ALSO BY JAMES SUZMAN

Affluence Without Abundance

PENGUIN PRESS

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First published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Circus, part of the Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020.

Extract from “Toads” from The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin, published by Faber and Faber Ltd and used with permission. ©

Philip Larkin, 2011.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Suzman, James, author.

Title: Work : a deep history, from the stone age to the age of robots / James Suzman.

Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020040534 (print) | LCCN 2020040535 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525561750 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525561767

(ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Work—History.

Classification: LCC HD4841 .S88 2021 (print) | LCC HD4841 (ebook) | DDC 331.09—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040534

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040535

Cover design: Stephanie Ross

Cover image: EllSan / Shutterstock

pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?

Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork

And drive the brute off?

Philip Larkin, “Toads”

Contents
Introduction: The Economic Problem
PART ONE: IN THE BEGINNING
1  To Live Is to Work
2  Idle Hands and Busy Beaks
3  Tools and Skills
4  Fire’s Other Gifts
PART TWO: THE PROVIDENT ENVIRONMENT
5  “The Original Affluent Society”
6  Ghosts in the Forest
PART THREE: TOILING IN THE FIELDS
7  Leaping off the Edge
8  Feasts and Famines
9  Time Is Money
10  The First Machines
PART FOUR: CREATURES OF THE CITY
11  The Bright Lights
12  The Malady of Infinite Aspiration
13  Top Talent
14  The Death of a Salaryman
15  The New Disease
Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Illustrations
1. A male masked weaver in the final stages of completing a nest
2. An Acheulean hand-ax
3. Ju/’hoan hunter’s kit
4. Relative brain sizes of ancestral humans
5. Reconstruction of a 70,000–75,000-year-old Nassarius shell
necklace recovered from Blombos Cave in South Africa
6. Independent centers of plant domestication
7. Reconstruction of a Natufian stone sickle
8. A monolithic “zookeeper” at Göbekli Tepe
9. Neolithic Middle East
10. The Oberkassel Puppy meets Aibo
11. Timeline indicating estimated dates and location of major
animal domestications
12. 10,000-year-old skeleton of a 2,200 lb, six-foot-tall auroch
recovered from Vig in Denmark in 1905
13. Proportion of the population living in urban areas, 1500–2016
14. The world’s oldest pay record: a cuneiform tablet documenting
payment of workers in beer c. 3000 BC
15. An aelopile—the first steam engine as described by Hero of
Alexander in AD 50
16. Changes in weekly working hours in the UK, USA, and France,
1870–2000
17. Graph showing real GDP per capita in the USA nearly doubles
between 1980 and 2015 but real median incomes stagnate
18. Changes in household income, USA 1945–2015
19. Clark’s tri-sector model indicating how service-sector sector
employment offset declines in primary and secondary industries

INTRODUCTION

THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM

The first industrial revolution was coughed out of the soot-blackened

chimneys of coal-fired steam engines; the second leaped from electric wall

sockets; and the third took the form of the electronic microprocessor. Now

we are in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution, born of the union of a

host of new digital, biological, and physical technologies, and we are told

that it will be exponentially more transformative than its predecessors. Even

so, no one is yet quite sure how it will play out, beyond the fact that ever

more tasks in our factories, businesses, and homes will be undertaken by

automated cyber-physical systems animated by machine-learning

algorithms.

For some, the prospect of an automated future heralds an era of robotic

convenience. For others, it is another fateful step on the journey toward a

cybernetic dystopia. But for many, the prospect of an automated future

raises only one immediate question: what will happen if a robot takes my

job?

For those in professions that have up to now been immune from

technological redundancy, the rise of the job-eating robots manifests in the

mundane: the choruses of robotic greetings and reprimands that emanate

from the ranks of automated tellers in supermarkets or the clumsy

algorithms that both guide and frustrate our adventures in the digital

universe.

For the hundreds of millions of unemployed people scraping a living in

the corrugated-iron margins of developing countries, where economic

growth is driven ever more by the marriage of cutting-edge technology and

capital and so generates few new jobs, automation is an altogether more

immediate concern. It is also an immediate concern for ranks of semi-

skilled workers in industrialized economies whose only option is to strike to

save their jobs from automata whose principal virtue is that they never go

on strike. And, even if it doesn’t feel like it just yet, the writing is on the

wall for some in highly skilled professions too. With artificial intelligence

now designing better artificial intelligence than people can, it looks like we

have been tricked by our own ingenuity into turning our factories, offices,

and workplaces into devil’s workshops that will leave our hands idle and

rob our lives of purpose.

If so, then we are right to worry. After all, we work to live and live to

work and are capable of finding meaning, satisfaction, and pride in almost

any job: from the rhythmic monotony of mopping floors to gaming tax

loopholes. The work we do also defines who we are; determines our future

prospects; dictates where and with whom we spend most of our time;

mediates our sense of self-worth; molds many of our values; and orients our

political loyalties. So much so that we sing the praises of strivers, decry the

laziness of shirkers, and the goal of universal employment remains a mantra

for politicians of all stripes.

Beneath this lies the conviction that we are genetically hardwired to work

and that our species’ destiny has been shaped by a unique convergence of

purposefulness, intelligence, and industriousness that has enabled us to

build societies that are so much more than the sum of their parts.

Our anxieties about an automated future contrast with the optimism of

many thinkers and dreamers who, ever since the first stirrings of the

Industrial Revolution, believed that automation was the key that would

unlock an economic utopia. People like Adam Smith, the founding father of

economics, who in 1776 sung the praises of the “very pretty machines” that

he believed would in time “facilitate and abridge labor,”1 or Oscar Wilde

who a century later fantasized about a future “in which machinery will be

doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.”2 But none made the case as

comprehensively as the twentieth century’s most influential economist,

John Maynard Keynes. He predicted in 1930 that by the early twenty-first

century capital growth, improving productivity, and technological advances

should have brought us to the foothills of an economic “promised land” in

which everybody’s basic needs were easily satisfied and where, as a result,

nobody worked more than fifteen hours in a week.

We passed the productivity and capital growth thresholds Keynes

calculated would need to be met to get there some decades ago. Most of us

still work just as hard as our grandparents and great-grandparents did, and

our governments remain as fixated on economic growth and employment

creation as at any point in our recent history. More than this, with private

and state pension funds groaning under the weight of their obligations to

increasingly aged populations, many of us are expected to work almost a

decade longer than we did half a century ago; and despite unprecedented

advances in technology and productivity in some of the world’s most

advanced economies like Japan and South Korea, hundreds of avoidable

deaths every year are now officially accredited to people logging eye-

watering levels of overtime.

Humankind, it seems, is not yet ready to claim its collective pension.

Understanding why requires recognizing that our relationship with work is

far more interesting and involved than most traditional economists would

have us believe.

Keynes believed that reaching his economic promised land would be our

species’ most singular achievement because we will have done nothing less

than solve what he described as “the most pressing problem of the human

race . . . from the beginnings of life in its most primitive form.”

The “pressing problem” Keynes had in mind was what classical

economists refer to as the “economic problem” and sometimes also as the

“problem of scarcity.” It holds that we are rational creatures cursed with

insatiable appetites and that because there are simply not enough resources

to satisfy everybody’s wants, everything is scarce. The idea that we have

infinite wants but that all resources are limited sits at the beating heart of

the definition of economics as the study of how people allocate scarce

resources to meet their needs and desires. It also anchors our markets,

financial, employment, and monetary systems. To economists, then, scarcity

is what drives us to work, for it is only by working—by making, producing,

and trading scarce resources—that we can ever begin to bridge the gap

between our apparently infinite desires and our limited means.

But the problem of scarcity offers a bleak assessment of our species. It

insists that evolution has molded us into selfish creatures, cursed to be

forever burdened by desires that we can never satisfy. And as much as this

assumption about human nature may seem obvious and self-evident to

many in the industrialized world, to many others, like the Ju/’hoansi

“Bushmen” of southern Africa’s Kalahari, who still lived as hunter-

gatherers through to the late twentieth century, it does not ring true.

I have been documenting their often traumatic encounter with a

relentlessly expanding global economy since the early 1990s. It is an often

brutal story, set in a frontier between two profoundly different ways of life,

each grounded in very different social and economic philosophies based on

very different assumptions about the nature of scarcity. For the Ju/’hoansi,

the market economy and the assumptions about human nature that

underwrite it are as bewildering as they are frustrating. They are not alone

in this. Other societies who continued to hunt and gather into the twentieth

century, from the Hadzabe of East Africa to the Inuit in the Arctic, have

similarly struggled to make sense of and adapt to norms of an economic

system predicated on eternal scarcity.

When Keynes first described his economic utopia, the study of hunter-

gatherer societies was barely more than a sideshow in the newly emerging

discipline of social anthropology. Even if he had wished to know more

about hunter-gatherers, he would not have found much to challenge the

prevailing view at the time that life in primitive societies was a constant

battle against starvation. Nor would he have found anything to persuade

him that, despite the occasional setback, the human journey was, above all,

a story of progress and that the engine of progress was our urge to work, to

produce, to build, and to exchange, spurred by our innate urge to solve the

economic problem.

But we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live

constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well

nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely

worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at

rest and leisure. We also know that they could do this because they did not

routinely store food, cared little for accumulating wealth or status, and

worked almost exclusively to meet only their short-term material needs.

Where the economic problem insists that we are all cursed to live in the

purgatory between our infinite desires and limited means, hunter-gatherers

had few material desires, which could be satisfied with a few hours of

effort. Their economic life was organized around the presumption of

abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so,

there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and

gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old

history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and

our attitudes to work have their roots in farming.

Acknowledging that for most of human history our ancestors were not as

preoccupied with scarcity as we are now reminds us that there is far more to

work than our efforts to solve the economic problem. This is something we

all recognize: we routinely describe all sorts of purposeful activities beyond

our jobs as work. We can work, for instance, at our relationships, on our

bodies, and even at our leisure.

When economists define work as the time and effort we spend meeting

our needs and wants, they dodge two obvious problems. The first is that

often the only thing that differentiates work from leisure is context and

whether we are being paid to do something or are paying to do it. To an

ancient forager, hunting an elk is work, but to many First World hunters it is

an exhilarating and often very expensive leisure activity; to a commercial

artist, drawing is work, but to millions of amateur artists it is a relaxing

pleasure; and to a lobbyist, cultivating relationships with movers and

shakers is work, but for most of the rest of us making friends is a joy. The

second problem is that beyond the energy we expend to secure our most

basic needs—food, water, air, warmth, companionship, and safety—there is

very little that is universal about what constitutes a necessity. More than

this, necessity often merges so imperceptibly with desire that it can be

impossible to separate them. Thus some will insist that a breakfast of a

croissant served alongside good coffee is a necessity while for others it is a

luxury.

The closest thing to a universal definition of “work”—one that hunter-

gatherers, pinstriped derivatives traders, calloused subsistence farmers, and

anyone else would agree on—is that it involves purposefully expending

energy or effort on a task to achieve a goal or end. Ever since ancient

humans first began to divide up the world around them and organize their

experiences of it in terms of concepts, words, and ideas, they have almost

certainly had some concept of work. Like love, parenthood, music, and

mourning, work is one of the few concepts that anthropologists and

travelers alike have been able to cling to when cast adrift in alien lands. For

where spoken language or bewildering customs are an obstruction, the

simple act of helping someone perform a job will often break down barriers

far quicker than any clumsy utterances. It expresses goodwill and, like a

dance or a song, it creates a communion of purpose and a harmony of

experience.

Abandoning the idea that the economic problem is the eternal condition

of the human race does more than extend the definition of work beyond

how we make a living. It provides us with a new lens through which to

view our deep historical relationship with work from the very beginnings of

life through to our busy present. It also raises a series of new questions.

Why do we now afford work so much more importance than our hunting

and gathering ancestors did? Why, in an era of unprecedented abundance,

do we remain so preoccupied with scarcity?

Answering these questions requires venturing far beyond the bounds of

traditional economics and into the world of physics, evolutionary biology,

and zoology. But perhaps most importantly it requires bringing a social

anthropological perspective to bear on them. It is only through social

anthropological studies of societies who continued to hunt and gather into

the twentieth century that we are able to animate the flaked stones, rock art,

and broken bones that are the only abundant material clues to how our

foraging ancestors lived and worked. It is also only through taking a social

anthropological approach that we can begin to make sense of how our

experiences of the world are molded by the different kinds of work we do.

Taking this broader approach offers us some surprising insights into the

ancient roots of what are often considered to be uniquely modern

challenges. It reveals, for instance, how our relationships with working

machines are resonant of the relationship between early farmers and the cart

horses, oxen, and other beasts of burden that aided them in their work, and

how our anxieties about automation are remarkably reminiscent of those

that kept people in slave-owning societies awake at night, and why.

When it comes to charting the history of our relationship with work, there

are two intersecting pathways that are the most obvious to follow.

The first maps the story of our relationship with energy. At its most

fundamental, work is always an energy transaction and the capacity to do

certain kinds of work is what distinguishes living organisms from dead,

inanimate matter. For only living things actively seek out and capture

energy specifically to live, to grow, and to reproduce. The journey down

this pathway reveals that we are not the only species who are routinely

profligate with energy; or who become listless, depressed, and demoralized

when they are deprived of purpose and there is no work to do. This in turn

raises a whole series of other questions about the nature of work and our

relationship with it. Do, for example, organisms like bacteria, plants, and

cart horses also work? If so, in what ways does the work they do differ from

the work that humans and the machines that we build do? And what does

this tell us about the way we work?

This pathway begins at the moment an energy source first somehow

bound together a chaos of different molecules to form living organisms. It is

also a path that widens steadily and ever more rapidly as life progressively

expanded across the earth’s surface and evolved to capture new sources of

energy, among them sunlight, oxygen, flesh, fire, and eventually fossil fuels

with which to do work.

The second pathway follows the human evolutionary and cultural

journey. Its early physical milestones take the form of rough stone tools,

ancient hearths, and broken beads. Later milestones take the form of

powerful engines, giant cities, stock exchanges, industrial-scale farms,

nation states, and vast networks of energy-hungry machines. But this is a

pathway also littered with many invisible milestones. These take the form

of ideas, concepts, ambitions, hopes, habits, rituals, practices, institutions,

and stories—the building blocks of culture and history. The journey down

this pathway reveals how, as our ancestors developed the capacity to master

many new different skills, our remarkable purposefulness was honed to the

point that we are now capable of finding meaning, joy, and deep satisfaction

in activities like building pyramids, digging holes, and doodling. It also

shows how the work they did and the skills they acquired progressively

shaped their experience of, and interactions with, the world around them.

But it is the points where these two pathways converge that are most

important in terms of making sense of our contemporary relationship with

work. The first of these points of convergence comes when humans

mastered fire possibly as long as a million years ago. In learning how to

outsource some of their energy needs to flames, they acquired the gift of

more time free from the food-quest, the means to stay warm in the cold, and

the ability to vastly extend their diets, so fueling the growth of ever more

energy-hungry, harder-working brains.

The second crucial point of convergence was far more recent, and

arguably far more transformative. It began some 12,000 years ago when

some of our ancestors began to routinely store food and experiment with

cultivation, transforming their relationships with their environments, with

each other, with scarcity, and with work. Exploring this point of

convergence also reveals how much of the formal economic architecture

around which we organize our working lives today had its origins in

farming and how intimately our ideas about equality and status are bound

into our attitudes to work.

A third point of convergence occurs when people began to gather in

cities and towns. This was around 8,000 years ago, when some agricultural

societies started to generate big enough food surpluses to sustain large

urban populations. And it too represents a major new chapter in the history

of work—one defined not by the need to capture energy by working in the

fields, but rather by the demands of spending it. The birth of the first cities

seeded the genesis of a whole new range of skills, professions, jobs, and

trades that were unimaginable in subsistence farming or foraging societies.

The emergence of large villages, then towns, and finally cities also

played a vital role in reshaping the dynamics of the economic problem and

scarcity. Because most urban people’s material needs were met by farmers

who produced food in the countryside, they focused their restless energy in

pursuit of status, wealth, pleasure, leisure, and power. Cities quickly

became crucibles of inequality, a process that was accelerated by the fact

that within cities people were not bound together by the same intimate

kinship and social ties that were characteristic of small rural communities.

As a result, people living in cities increasingly began to bind their social

identity ever more tightly to the work they did and find community among

others who pursued the same trade as them.

The fourth point of convergence is marked by the appearance of factories

and mills belching smoke from great chimneys as populations in Western

Europe learned to unlock ancient stores of energy from fossil fuels and

transform them into hitherto unimaginable material prosperity. At this point,

which begins early in the eighteenth century, both pathways expand

abruptly. They become more crowded, accommodating the rapid growth in

the number and size of cities, a surge in the population of both humans and

the animal and plant species our ancestors domesticated. They also become

far busier as a result of the turbocharging of our collective preoccupation

with scarcity and work—paradoxically as a result of there being more stuff

than ever before. And while it is still too early tell, it is hard to avoid the

suspicion that future historians will not distinguish between the first,

second, third, and fourth industrial revolutions, but will instead consider

this extended moment as critical as any other in our species’ relationship

with work.

PART ONE

In the Beginning

TO LIVE IS TO WORK

On this particular afternoon in the spring of 1994, it was so hot that even

the children with their rawhide feet winced as they darted across the sand

from one patch of shade to the next. There was no breeze and the dust

clouds kicked up by the missionary’s Land Cruiser as it thundered up the

rough sand track toward the Skoonheid Resettlement Camp in Namibia’s

Kalahari Desert hung in the air long after the vehicle had come to a halt.

For the nearly 200 Ju/’hoansi Bushmen sheltering from the sun,

occasional visits from missionaries were a welcome break from the

monotony of waiting for government food handouts. They were also far

more entertaining than traipsing across the desert from one vast cattle ranch

to the next in the hope of persuading a white farmer to give them some

work. Over the preceding half-century of living under the whip of the

ranchers who had robbed them of their land, even the most skeptical among

this community—the remnants of the most enduring hunter-gatherer society

on earth—had come to believe it was common sense to pay attention to the

ordained emissaries of the farmers’ God. Some even found comfort in their

words.

As the sun dropped toward the western horizon, the missionary climbed

out of his Land Cruiser, set up an improvised pulpit at the base of the tree

trunk, and summoned the congregation. It was still meltingly hot, and they

sluggishly convened in the dappled shade of the tree. The only drawback of

this arrangement was that, as the sun fell lower, the congregation had to

periodically rearrange itself to remain in the shade, a process that involved

much getting up, sitting down, elbowing, and nudging. As the service

progressed and the tree’s shadow lengthened, the majority of the

congregation shifted progressively further and further away from the pulpit,

forcing the missionary to deliver much of his sermon in a sustained bellow.

The setting added a certain biblical gravitas to the proceedings. Not only

did the sun provide the missionary with a squint-inducing halo, but like the

moon that would soon rise in the east and the tree the congregation sat

beneath, the sun had a starring role in the tale he had to tell: Genesis and the

Fall of Man.

The missionary began by reminding his congregation that the reason why

people came together to worship every Sunday was because God had

worked tirelessly for six days to make the heavens, earth, oceans, sun,

moon, birds, beasts, fish, and so on, and only rested on the seventh day

when his work was done. He reminded them that because humans were

created in His image, they too were expected to toil for six days and on the

seventh to rest, and offer gratitude for the uncountable blessings that the

Lord had bestowed upon them.

The missionary’s opening declaration generated some head nodding as

well as an amen or two from the more enthusiastic congregation members.

But most found it a challenge to identify exactly what blessings they should

be grateful for. They knew what it meant to work hard, and they understood

the importance of having time to rest, even if they had no idea how it felt to

share in the material rewards of their labors. Over the preceding half

century, it was their hands that did the heavy lifting that transformed this

semi-arid environment into profitable cattle ranches. And over this period

the farmers, who were otherwise not shy of using the whip to “cure”

Ju/’hoan workers of idleness, always gave them time off on Sundays.

The missionary then told his congregation how after the Lord had

instructed Adam and Eve to care for the Garden of Eden they were seduced

by the serpent into committing mortal sin, as a result of which the Almighty

“cursed the ground” and banished the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve

to a life of toil in the fields.

This particular Bible story made more sense to the Ju/’hoansi than many

others the missionaries told them—and not just because they all knew what

it meant to be tempted to sleep with people they knew they shouldn’t. In it

they saw a parable of their own recent history. All the old Ju/’hoansi at

Skoonheid remembered when this land was their sole domain and when

they lived exclusively by hunting for wild animals and gathering wild fruits,

tubers, and vegetables. They recalled that back then, like Eden, their desert

environment was eternally (if temperamentally) provident and almost

always gave them enough to eat on the basis of a few, often spontaneous,

hours’ effort. Some now speculated that it must have been as a result of

some similar mortal sin on their part that, starting in the 1920s, first a

trickle then a flood of white farmers and colonial police arrived in the

Kalahari with their horses, guns, water pumps, barbed wire, cattle, and

strange laws, and claimed all this land for themselves.

For their part, the white farmers quickly learned that farming in an

environment as hostile to large-scale agriculture as the Kalahari would take

a lot of labor. So they formed commandos to capture and force into work

the “wild” Bushmen, held Bushman children hostage to ensure their

parents’ obedience, and meted out regular whippings to teach them the

“virtues of hard work.” Deprived of their traditional lands, the Ju/’hoansi

learned that to survive, like Adam and Eve, they must toil on farms.

For thirty years, they settled into this life. But when in 1990 Namibia

gained its independence from South Africa, technological advances meant

that the farms were both more productive and less dependent on labor than

they had been. And with a new government demanding that ranchers treat

their Ju/’hoan laborers as formal employees and provide them with proper

salaries and housing, many farmers simply chased them from their land.

They reasoned that it was far more economical and far less trouble to invest

in the right machinery and run their farms with as few staff as possible. As a

result, many Ju/’hoansi had little option but to camp by the side of the road,

squat in the fringes of Herero villages to the north, or move to one of the

two small resettlement areas where there was little to do but sit and wait for

food aid.

This is where the story of the fall ceased to make much sense to the

Ju/’hoansi. For if, like Adam and Eve, they were banished by God to a life

of toil in the fields, why had they now been banished from the fields by

farmers who said they no longer had any use for them?

Sigmund Freud was convinced that all the world’s mythologies—including

the biblical story of Adam and Eve—held within them the secrets to the

mysteries of our “psycho-sexual development.” By contrast, his colleague

and rival Carl Gustav Jung considered myths to be nothing less than the

distilled essence of humanity’s “collective unconscious.” And to Claude

Lévi-Strauss, the intellectual touchstone of much twentieth-century social

anthropology, all the world’s mythologies combined to form an immense

and intricate puzzle box that if properly decoded would reveal the “deep

structures” of the human mind.

The diverse mythologies of the world may or may not offer us a window

into our “collective unconscious,” explain our sexual hang-ups, or let us

peer into the deep structures of our minds. But there is no doubt that they

reveal some things that are universal to human experience. One is the idea

that our world—no matter how perfect it was at the moment of creation—is

subject to chaotic forces and that humans must work to keep these in check.

Among the missionary’s congregation at Skoonheid that hot afternoon

were a handful of “old-time people.” They were the last Ju/’hoansi here to

have spent much of their lives as hunter-gatherers. They bore the trauma of

being violently wrenched from their old lives with the kind of stoicism that

characterized traditional hunter-gatherer life, and as they awaited death they

found comfort in retelling one another the “stories of the beginning”—the

Creation myths—they learned as children.

Before Christian missionaries showed up with their own version of the

tale, the Ju/’hoansi believed the creation of the world happened in two

distinct phases. In the first phase their creator God made himself, his wives,

a lesser trickster god called G//aua, the world, rain, lightning, holes in the

ground that collected rainwater, plants, animals, and finally people. But

before completing the job, he spent time on something else, leaving the

unfinished world in a state of chaotic ambiguity. There were no social rules,

no customs, and people and animals alike shape-shifted from one bodily

form to another, variously intermarrying and eating one another as well as

engaging in all sorts of outlandish behavior. Fortunately, the creator didn’t

abandon his creation forever and eventually returned to finish the job. He

did so by imposing rules and order on the world, first by separating and

naming the different species and then by endowing each with its own

customs, rules, and characteristics.

The “stories of the beginning” that delighted the old men of Skoonheid

are all set during the period when the creator, leaving his work incomplete,

took his extended cosmic sabbatical—perhaps, as one man suggested,

because he needed to take a rest just as the Christian God did. Most of these

stories tell of how in the creator’s absence the trickster thrived, causing

mayhem and chaos wherever he went. In one story, for example, G//aua

cuts out, cooks, and serves his own anus to his family, and laughs

hysterically at the brilliance of his own joke when they compliment him on

the tastiness of the dish. In others, he cooks and eats his wife, rapes his

mother, steals children from their parents, and callously commits murder.

But G//aua did not rest when the creator returned to finish his work, and

ever since has picked mischievously and unrelentingly at the world’s

orderly seams. Thus where the Ju/’hoansi associated the creator God with

order, predictability, rules, manners, and continuity, G//aua was associated

with randomness, chaos, ambiguity, discord, and disorder. And the

Ju/’hoansi detected G//aua’s devilish hand at work in all sorts of different

things. They noticed it, for instance, when lions behaved

uncharacteristically; when someone fell mysteriously ill; when a bowstring

frayed or a spear snapped; or when they were persuaded by a mysterious

inner voice to sleep with someone else’s spouse while being only too aware

of the discord this would cause.

The old-time people were in no doubt that the serpent who tempted

Adam and Eve in the missionary’s story was none other than their trickster

G//aua in one of his many disguises. Spreading lies, persuading people to

embrace forbidden desires, and then cheerfully witnessing the life-

shattering consequences play out was exactly the sort of thing G//aua liked

to do.

Ju/’hoansi are but one of many peoples to have discovered their own

cosmic troublemakers lurking beneath the skin of Eden’s smooth-talking

serpent. Tricksters, troublemakers, and destroyers—like Odin’s wayward

son Loki, the coyote and raven in many indigenous North American

cultures, or Anansi, the short-tempered, shape-shifting spider that scuttles

through many West African and Caribbean mythologies—have been

creating work for people to do since the beginning of time.

It is no coincidence that tension between chaos and order is a feature of

the world’s mythologies. After all, science also insists that there is a

universal relationship between disorder and work, one that was first

revealed during the heady days of the Enlightenment in Western Europe.

Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis loved the game of table billiards—a hobby to

which he devoted many happy hours of practical “research,” the results of

which he published in the Théorie mathématique des effets du jeu de

billiard, a book still invoked with biblical solemnity by aficionados of

billiards’ descendants, snooker and pool. He was born in the revolutionary

summer of 1792, the same year that France’s Citizens’ Assembly abolished

the monarchy and dragged King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from the

Palace of Versailles to await their appointment with the guillotine. But

Coriolis was a revolutionary of a different sort. He was one of the vanguard

of men and women who had turned their back on theological dogma and

instead embraced reason, the explanatory power of mathematics, and the

rigor of the scientific method to make sense of the world, and who as a

result ushered in the industrial age after unlocking the transformative

energy of fossil fuels.

Coriolis is now best remembered for formulating the “Coriolis Effect,”

without which meteorologists would have no sensible way of modeling the

swirling forms of weather systems or the vagaries of ocean currents. More

importantly for us he is also remembered for introducing the term “work”

into the lexicon of modern science.

Coriolis’s interest in table billiards extended beyond the satisfaction he

gained from the predictable click-clack of ivory balls as they collided with

one another, or even the thrill he experienced when one, guided by his cue,

slipped off the table into a pocket. To him, billiards revealed the infinite

explanatory power of mathematics, and the billiard table was a space where

people like him could observe, tinker, and play with some of the

fundamental laws that governed the physical universe. Not only did the

balls evoke the celestial bodies whose movements were described by

Galileo, but every time he rested his billiard cue on his hand, he channeled

the elemental principles of geometry as outlined by Euclid, Pythagoras, and

Archimedes. And every time his cue ball, energized by the movement of his

arm, struck other balls, they diligently followed the laws on mass, motion,

and force identified by Sir Isaac Newton nearly a century earlier. They also

raised a whole range of questions about friction, elasticity, and the transfer

of energy.

Unsurprisingly, Coriolis’s most important contributions to science and

mathematics focused on the effects of motion on rotating spheres: the

kinetic energy an object like a billiard ball possesses due to its motion, and

the process by which energy is transferred from an arm and through a cue to

send billiard balls scuttling around the table.

It was in 1828, when describing a version of the latter phenomenon, that

Coriolis first introduced the term “work” to describe the force that needed

to be applied to move an object over a particular distance.1

When Coriolis referred to the process of hitting a billiard ball as doing

“work,” he was, of course, not focused singularly on billiards. The first

economically viable steam engines had been invented a few years

previously, showing that fire was capable of much more than charring meat

and melting iron in a smithy’s forge. Yet there was no satisfactory way of

evaluating the capabilities of the steam engines that were powering

Europe’s Industrial Revolution. Coriolis wanted to describe, measure, and

compare accurately the capabilities of things like water wheels, cart horses,

steam engines, and human beings.

By then many other mathematicians and engineers had already arrived at

concepts broadly equivalent to what Coriolis called “work.” But none had

quite found the right vocabulary to describe it. Some called it “dynamical

effect,” others “laboring force,” and others still “motive force.”

Coriolis’s equations were quickly pronounced sound by his scientific

peers, but it was his terminology that impressed them most. It was as if he

had found the perfect word to describe a concept that had teased them for

years. Over and above the fact that “work” described exactly what steam

engines were designed to do, the French word for work, travail, has a poetic

quality that is absent in many other languages. It connotes not just effort but

also suffering, and so evoked the recent tribulations of France’s Third Estate

—the lower classes—that had labored for so long under the yoke of wigged

aristocrats and monarchs with a taste for grandeur. And in linking the

potential of machines to liberate the peasantry from a life of labor, he

invoked an embryonic version of the dream, later taken up by John

Maynard Keynes, of technology leading us to a promised land.

“Work” is now used to describe all transfers of energy, from those that

occur on a celestial scale when galaxies and stars form to those that take

place at a subatomic level. Science also now recognizes that the creation of

our universe involved colossal amounts of work, and that what makes life

so extraordinary and what differentiates living things from dead things are

the very unusual kinds of work that living things do.

Living things have a number of distinct characteristics that non-living

things do not. The most obvious and important of these is that living things

actively harvest and use energy to organize their atoms and molecules into

cells, their cells into organs, and their organs into bodies; to grow and to

reproduce; and when they stop doing that they die and, with no energy to

hold them together, they decompose. Put another way, to live is to work.

The universe hosts a bewildering array of complex and dynamic systems

—from galaxies to planets—that we sometimes also describe as being

“alive.” But, besides cellular organisms, none of these purposively harvest

energy from other sources and then use that to do work to stay alive and

reproduce. A “living” star, for instance, does not actively replenish its

energy from its environment. Nor does it seek to produce offspring that will

in time grow up to be just like it. Rather it fuels the work it does by

destroying its own mass, and “dies” once that mass is depleted.

Life actively works to survive, grow, and reproduce potentially in spite of

what some physicists consider to be the “supreme law of the universe”: the

second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy. The

second law of thermodynamics describes the tendency for all energy to

distribute itself evenly across the universe. Embodied in the many tricksters

that have made mischief in the world’s mythologies, entropy relentlessly

unpicks whatever order the universe creates. And in time, like the

malevolent trickster god Loki of Norse mythology, the second law of

thermodynamics insists that entropy will bring about an Armageddon—not

because it will destroy the universe but rather because, when it achieves its

goal of distributing all energy evenly across the universe, no free energy

will be available with the result that no work, in the physical sense of the

word, can be done.

If we have an intuitive grasp of some aspects of entropy, it is because this

trickster winks at us from every shadow. We see it in the decay of our

buildings and our bodies, in the collapse of empires, in the way milk blends

into our coffee, and in the constant effort required to maintain any kind of

order in our lives, our societies, and our world.

For the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution, entropy revealed itself by

thwarting their efforts to build perfectly efficient steam engines.

In all their experiments, they observed that heat energy inevitably tended

to distribute itself evenly within boilers and then through the boilers’ metal

skins to the world outside. They also noticed that heat energy always

flowed from hotter to colder bodies and that once the heat was distributed

evenly, it was impossible to reverse the process without adding more

energy. This is why once a cup of tea has reached room temperature there is

no chance of it drawing some energy out of the room to warm itself up

again. They also noted that in order to reverse entropy’s impact, more work

needed to be done using energy sourced from outside that system. Bringing

your tea back to an acceptable temperature requires additional energy.

For a while, the law of entropy was considered to be a bewildering fact

of existence. Then, between 1872 and 1875, an Austrian physicist, Ludwig

Boltzmann, worked the numbers. He showed that the way heat behaved

could be neatly described by means of the arithmetic of probability.2 There

are, he argued, infinitely more ways for heat to be spread among the

trillions of molecules in a spoonful of water than for the heat to remain

stored in just a few of those particles. This means that as the particles move

around and interact with one another, the odds are so overwhelmingly in

favor of the energy being evenly distributed that it has to be considered

inevitable. By extension, his mathematical model suggested that all the

energy in the largest container of all, the universe, will tend to do the same.

In offering a mathematical model to describe entropy, Boltzmann

simultaneously engineered its escape from the relatively narrow confines of

engineering and showed us why we intuitively see entropy in decaying

buildings, eroding mountains, exploding stars, spilled milk, death, cold cups

of tea, and even democracy.

States of low entropy are “highly ordered,” like children’s bedrooms

when the children are forced to tidy up and stow their toys, gadgets, clothes,

books, and tubs of slime in assorted drawers and cupboards. States of high

entropy, by contrast, are similar to their rooms a few hours later, once the

children have picked up and then dropped everything they own seemingly

at random. According to Boltzmann’s calculations, every possible

arrangement of a kid’s stuff in their rooms is equally probable in a physical

sense if children, as it appears is the case, are nothing more than random-

stuff redistributors. There is of course a minuscule chance that, as random-

stuff redistributors, they might accidentally put all their things back where

they are supposed to be for the rooms to be considered tidy. The problem is

that there are vastly more ways for the rooms to be messy than there are for

them to be tidy, so the chances are hugely in favor of their rooms being

messy until a parent demands they do the work—and so expend the energy

necessary—to restore their rooms to an acceptably low state of entropy.

Even if there are many orders of magnitude simpler than a child’s

bedroom, the now venerable Rubik’s cube gives us a sense of the

mathematical scales involved. This puzzle, with its six different-colored

faces made up of nine squares and organized on a fixed central pivot that

makes it possible to rotate any one of the faces independently of the others

and so mix up the colored squares, has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000

possible unsolved states and only one solved state.3

In 1886, four years after Charles Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey,

Boltzmann was invited to deliver a prestigious public lecture at the Imperial

Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

“If you ask me about my innermost conviction whether our century will

be called the century of iron or the century of steam or electricity,”

Boltzmann announced to his audience, “I answer without hesitation: it will

be called the century of the mechanical view of nature, the century of

Darwin.”4

A generation younger than Darwin, Ludwig Boltzmann’s work was no

less a challenge to God’s authority than Darwin’s proposal that it was

evolution rather than God that best accounted for the diversity of life. In a

universe governed by the laws of thermodynamics, there was no room for

God’s commandments, and the ultimate destiny of everything was pre-

determined.

Boltzmann’s admiration for Darwin was not based solely on their shared

experience of taking wrecking balls to religious dogma. It was also because

he saw entropy’s hand busily shaping evolution, an idea that would only be

fully fleshed out a generation later by the Nobel Prize–winning quantum

physicist Erwin Schrödinger, best known for packing imaginary cats into

imaginary boxes.

Schrödinger was convinced that the relationship between life and entropy

was fundamental. Others before him, including Boltzmann, had made the

point that living organisms were all thermodynamic engines: like steam

engines they required fuel in the form of food, air, and water to work, and in

working they also converted some of this fuel into heat that was

subsequently lost to the universe. But no one followed this idea to its

inevitable conclusion until Schrödinger presented a series of lectures to an

audience at Trinity College Dublin in 1943.

Schrödinger’s father was an enthusiastic amateur gardener. He was

especially fascinated by the way he could tip evolution’s hand by carefully

selecting seeds of plants with specific characteristics he found desirable.

Inspired by his father’s horticultural experiments, Schrödinger retained an

interest in heredity and evolution that endured long after theoretical physics

became the main focus of his work.

Before Schrödinger delivered his Dublin lectures, which were published

a year later in the form of a short book called What Is Life?, biology was an

orphan among the natural sciences.5 Up until then, most scientists were

content to accept that life operated according to its own strange and

distinctive rules. Schrödinger, however, was of the view that biology should

be adopted as a fully fledged member of the scientific family. That night, he

set out to persuade his audience that the science of life—biology—was just

another, admittedly complex, branch of physics and chemistry. Just because

physicists and chemists had not yet been able to explain life, he explained

to his audience, it did not mean that there was any “reason at all for

doubting” that they could.

Schrödinger’s description of what he imagined to be the extraordinary

information-encoding and instruction-giving capabilities of the atoms and

molecules in our cells—DNA and RNA—inspired a generation of scientists

to dedicate their careers to unraveling the chemical and physical bases of

biology. Among this pioneering group of molecular biologists was

Cambridge’s Francis Crick who, along with his partner James Watson,

would reveal the distinctive double-helix shape of DNA to the world a

decade later.

Schrödinger’s wonder for the ability of the “incredibly small group of

atoms”6 that comprise a genome to organize trillions of other atoms into

hair, livers, fingers, eyeballs, and so on was because these atoms did so in

apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. Unlike almost

everything else in the universe, which seemed to tend toward increasing

disorder, life insolently gathered matter together and then organized it very

precisely into astonishingly complex structures that gathered free energy

and reproduced.

But as much as living organisms appeared to be only superficially

accomplished and systematic violators of the law of entropy, Schrödinger

recognized that life simply could not exist in violation of the second law of

thermodynamics. This meant that life needed to contribute to the overall

entropy in the universe, and he concluded that it did this by seeking out and

capturing free energy, using it to do work, which generated heat, and thus

added to the total entropy in the universe. He also noted that the bigger and

more complex an organism, the more work it needed to stay alive, grow,

and reproduce, and that as a result, complex structures, like living

organisms, were often far more energetic contributors to the total entropy of

the universe than objects like rocks.

If life can be defined by the kinds of work living things do, then the process

of transforming inorganic terrestrial matter into living, organic matter must

have involved some kind of work—an energy-packed jump-start that set the

engine of primordial life running. Precisely where this energy came from is

uncertain. It may have sprung from the finger of God, but far more likely it

was sourced from the geochemical reactions that made early earth seethe

and fizz, or by the decay of radioactive materials in ancient earth

succumbing slowly to entropy.

The fact that abiogenesis—the process by which life first appeared—

involved work is perhaps the least mysterious part of it. Up until the turn of

the third millennium, the balance of scientific data suggested that the

emergence of life was so improbable that we were almost certainly alone in

the universe. Now, for some scientists at least, the pendulum has swung the

other way. They are more inclined to think that life may have been

inevitable and that entropy, the trickster god, was not just a destroyer but

may well have also been the creator of life. This perspective is based on the

idea that biological systems might suddenly emerge because they more

efficiently dissipate heat energy than many inorganic forms, so adding to

the total entropy of the universe.7

One of the things that persuaded some of them was digital simulations

that indicated that where atoms and molecules are subjected to a highly

directed energy source (like the sun) and are also surrounded by an energy

bath (like a sea), particles will spontaneously arrange themselves in all sorts

of different formations, as if experimenting to find the arrangement that

dissipates heat energy most effectively.8 If this is the case, this model

suggests, then there is a pretty good chance that one of the countless

possible arrangements the atoms and molecules shuffle through might be

one that transforms dead inorganic matter into a living organism.

The long history of life on earth has been described in terms of life’s ability

to capture energy from new sources—first geothermal energy, then sunlight,

then oxygen, and then the flesh of other living organisms—as well as the

evolution of increasingly complex, more energy-hungry, and, in the

physical sense, harder-working life forms.9

The first living creatures on planet Earth were almost certainly simple

single-celled organisms that, like bacteria, had neither nuclei nor

mitochondria. They probably harvested energy from geochemical reactions

between water and rock, before transducing it into a highly specialized

molecule that stored the energy in its chemical bonds and released it when

those bonds were broken, so enabling the organism to do work. This

molecule, adenosine triphosphate, or “ATP,” is the immediate source of

energy used by all cells to do work—from unicellular bacteria to

multicellular anthropologists—to maintain their internal equilibrium, to

grow and to reproduce.

Life has been busy harvesting free energy, storing it in ATP molecules,

and then putting it to work on our planet for a very long time. There is

widespread fossil evidence attesting to the presence of bacterial life on earth

around 3.5 billion years ago. There is also disputed fossil evidence for life

dating to 4.2 billion years ago—a mere 300,000 years after the earth’s

formation.

The bacteria-like pioneers of life on earth had to cope with conditions

that, from the point of view of most life forms now, were astonishingly

hostile. Beyond the fact that early earth was seething with volcanic activity

and battered by a near-continuous barrage of meteorites, the atmosphere

had little oxygen and no ozone layer to protect delicate organisms from

being fried by solar radiation. As a result, earth’s earliest life forms toiled

far from the sun’s glare.

But, over time, thanks to another characteristic unique to life, its ability

to evolve, new species emerged that were capable of drawing energy from

other sources, and surviving and reproducing in different conditions. At

some point, probably around 2.7 billion years ago, life crept out from the

shadows as a series of fortuitous genetic mutations enabled some to

embrace life’s old enemy, sunlight, and draw energy from it by means of

photosynthesis. These organisms, cyanobacteria, still thrive today. We see

them in the bacterial blooms that bubble up in ponds and lakes.

As cyanobacteria flourished, so they set to work transforming the earth

into a macro-habitat capable of supporting far more complex life forms with

much higher energy demands. They did so first by converting atmospheric

nitrogen into organic compounds like nitrates and ammonia, which plants

need for their growth. They also worked to convert carbon dioxide into

oxygen and so played the critical role in inducing “the great oxidation

event” that began around 2.45 billion years ago, and which resulted in the

gradual creation of the oxygen-rich atmosphere that sustains us today.

The great oxidation event not only provided an entirely new source of

energy for life to exploit, but massively expanded the amount of energy

available for life to work with. Chemical reactions involving oxygen release

far more energy than those involving most other elements, which means

that individual aerobic (oxygen-breathing) organisms have the potential to

grow bigger, faster, and do much more physical work than anaerobic ones.

New, more elaborate living organisms called eukaryotes evolved to

exploit this energy-rich environment. Far more sophisticated and energy-

hungry than their prokaryotic ancestors, eukaryotes had nuclei, reproduced

by means of sexual reproduction, and could also generate all sorts of

complex proteins. In time, some eukaryotes are thought to have developed

mutations that enabled them to kidnap other passing life forms and plunder

their energy by engulfing them through permeable outer cell membranes.

The kidnapped cells had no choice but to share any energy they had

captured with their jailers, one of the processes that, over time, is thought to

have contributed to the emergence of multicellular life. The primitive algae,

which evolved into the first plants that eventually greened early earth’s

barren land masses, were likely to have been the progeny of cyanobacteria-

kidnapping eukaryotes.

The first creatures with both tissue and proper nervous systems are

thought to have evolved in the oceans around 700 million years ago. But it

was not until around 540 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion

that animal life really started to flourish. The fossil record for this period

shows evidence of creatures representing all the major contemporary phyla

—branches on the tree of life—that populate our world today.

Additional energy from increasing atmospheric and marine oxygen

certainly played a role in kick-starting the Cambrian explosion. But what

likely played a more important role was that evolution began to positively

select in favor of some life forms that harvested their energy from a novel,

much richer source of free energy than oxygen: they consumed other living

things that had already gone to the trouble of collecting and concentrating

energy and vital nutrients in their flesh, organs, shells, and bones.

By around 650 million years ago, enough atmospheric oxygen had

accumulated in the stratosphere to form a layer of ozone sufficiently thick

to screen out enough hazardous ultraviolet radiation to allow some life

forms to make a living on the fringes of the oceans without being fried.

Within 200 million years or so, the biosphere laid claim to much of the

earth’s land mass and slowly formed a series of connected, very complex

marine and terrestrial ecosystems packed with all sorts of organisms

diligently capturing free energy and using it to stay alive, secure more

energy, and reproduce.

Many of these new life forms put this energy to use in ways that far more

obviously look like the kinds of behaviors we humans associate with work.

While bacteria still comprised a substantial portion of the biosphere, the

presence of larger land-based animals transformed the nature of work that

living things did. Larger animals require lots of food but can do far more

physical work than relatively immobile microorganisms. Animals variously

burrow, hunt, flee, break, dig, fly, eat, fight, defecate, move things about,

and, in some cases, build.

The fact that from a physicist’s perspective all living organisms do work,

and that our planet’s biosphere was constructed over millions of generations

as a result of the work done by their various evolutionary ancestors, raises

an obvious question: How does the work done, for example, by a tree, a

cuttlefish, or a zebra, differ from that which has brought our species to the

cusp of creating artificial intelligence?

IDLE HANDS AND BUSY BEAKS

Unusually for a Californian celebrity, Koko did not worry a great deal about

her appearance. In 2016, when she passed away, nearly two years after

delivering a special address to the UN Climate Change Conference warning

of how human folly might lead us to oblivion, many prominent Californians

expressed pride in the achievements of one of their state’s beloved

daughters.

A lowland gorilla that had known only captivity, Koko owed her

celebrity to her unusual communication skills. She was a fluent and creative

user of Gorilla Sign Language, a specially designed gestural language based

roughly on American Sign Language. She also gave every indication of

understanding around 2,000 distinct spoken English words‚ about 10

percent of the active vocabulary most humans use. But Koko was terrible at

grammar. Attempts to school her in the rudiments of syntax confused and

frustrated her, and as a result, she often struggled to communicate with the

kind of clarity or creativity her trainers believed she wanted to. Beyond her

syntactical shortcomings, Koko’s human trainers entertained no doubts that

Koko was an emotionally and socially sophisticated individual.

“She laughs at her own jokes and those of others,” explained Penny

Patterson and Wendy Gordon, two of her long-term trainers and most

beloved friends. “She cries when hurt or left alone, screams when

frightened or angered. She talks about her feelings, using words such as

happy, sad, afraid, enjoy, eager, frustrate, mad, shame and, most frequently,

love. She grieves for those she has lost—a favorite cat that has died, a

friend who has gone away. She can talk about what happens when one dies,

but she becomes fidgety and uncomfortable when asked to discuss her own

death or the death of her companions. She displays a wonderful gentleness

with kittens and other small animals. She has even expressed empathy for

others seen only in pictures.”1

Many others were more skeptical. Her trainers insisted her large working

vocabulary was proof of her ability to see the world in terms of signs and

symbols, but skeptics insisted that she (like most other famous apes,

chimps, and bonobos who have been hailed as skilled users of graphic

symbol-based communication systems) was nothing more than a competent

mimic. And that her only real social skills were used to persuade her

trainers to give her occasional tickles and treats.

No one, however, disputed that she enjoyed the time she spent relaxing

with her kittens, got a buzz out of going on scenic drives with her trainers,

and that she sometimes got surly when she had to do more arduous tasks.

But her detractors were not convinced that she thought about work and

leisure in the same way that people did. Human work is purposeful, they

insisted, whereas the work done by animals is only ever purposive.

It is an important distinction.

A builder working purposefully to build a wall for a garage extension has

a clear idea what the finished wall will look like, and he has mentally

rehearsed all the steps necessary to build it as per the architect’s plans. But

he is not mixing cement and laying bricks in the summer heat for this

purpose alone. It is, after all, neither his wall nor his design. He is doing this

work because he is motivated by a whole series of second- and third-order

ambitions. If I were to interview him I might find out that he is working so

diligently because he has ambitions to become a master builder, that he is a

builder only because he likes to work outside, or, perhaps, just because he

wants to save enough money to finance his spouse’s childhood dream. The

list of possibilities is near endless.

Purposive behavior by contrast is behavior that an external observer may

be able to attribute purpose to but that the agent of that behavior neither

understands nor could describe. When a tree grows to maximize its leaves’

exposure to the sun so that it can harvest solar energy to convert carbon

dioxide and water into glucose, it is being purposive. When during the rainy

seasons what seems like thousands of moths fly fatally into the flames of a

Kalahari campfire, that behavior is also purposive. But as Koko’s trainers

learned, making absolute distinctions between purposeful and purposive

behavior is not always straightforward among other kinds of organisms.

When a pack of lions stalk a wildebeest, their base motivation is to

secure the energy necessary to survive. But in responding to their instinct,

they act far more purposefully than, for example, intestinal bacteria seeking

out a carbohydrate molecule. They use cover to stalk their prey, work as a

team, deploy a strategy of sorts, and make decisions throughout the process

of the hunt, based on which outcome they imagine would best satisfy their

purposive urge to chew on the flesh and organs of another creature.

Many researchers interested in understanding our cognitive evolution

have focused their efforts on revealing whether our closest primate relatives

and other obviously smart creatures like whales and dolphins are capable of

purposeful behavior in the same way that humans are. Being purposeful

requires an intuitive grasp of causality, the ability to imagine an outcome

arising from an action, and so also implies having “a theory of mind.”

Debates about how purposeful different animals are relative to humans

remain as contested as ever.

But a number of other animal species invite us to think differently about

some less obvious aspects of the way we work. Among these are creatures

like termites, bees, and ants, in whose ceaseless industry and social

sophistication we see echoes of the extraordinary changes to the way

humans worked after they became cooperative food producers and later

when they moved into cities. There are also many other species who, like

us, seem to spend an awful lot of energy doing work that seems to serve no

obvious purpose or who have evolved physical and behavioral traits that are

hard to account for because they seem so ostentatiously inefficient. Traits

like the tail of a male peacock.

In 1859, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, peacocks

were a must-have ornament in formal gardens across Britain. They also

strode imperiously across the lawns of London’s grand public parks,

occasionally fanning their plumage to the delight of passers-by.

Darwin was fond of birds. After all, it was the small but distinct

differences he noted between closely related finch populations on each of

the islands in the Galapagos that crystallized his understanding of natural

selection. But he was no fan of peacocks.

“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes

me sick!” he wrote to a friend in 1860.2 To him, the unblinking eyes that

adorned their oversized tail feathers mocked the efficient logic of evolution.

He wondered how it was possible that natural selection allowed any

creature to evolve such unwieldy, impractical, and energy-expensive tails

that, he was convinced, made the males easy pickings for predators.

In the end, Darwin found an answer to the problem of the peacock’s tail

in the similarly garish crinoline plumage of the Victorian ladies-about-town

who strolled among the peacocks in the parks and the dandyish fashions of

the tight-trousered men who courted them.

In 1871, he published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to

Sex, in which he explained how mate choice—sexual selection—

encouraged the development of all sorts of bizarre secondary traits, from

peacocks’ tails to oversized horns, aimed purely at making individuals in

some species irresistible to the opposite sex.

If natural selection was the “struggle for existence,” he argued, then

sexual selection was the “struggle for mates” and accounted for the

evolution of a host of “secondary sexual characteristics” that might be

disadvantageous to an individual organism’s chances of survival but

massively boosted its chances of reproducing. Evolution, in other words,

directed organisms to acquire and expend energy both on staying alive and

on making themselves attractive, and where the former demanded

efficiency and control, the latter tended to encourage wastefulness and

flamboyance.

It is now clear that peacocks’ tails are not the physical burden to

peacocks that Darwin imagined. Researchers who tested the speed at which

peacocks could take to the air to escape predators revealed that big tails did

not make any significant difference to their ability to get airborne and out of

the way in a hurry. It also turns out that peacocks’ tails probably don’t play

a particularly important role in mate selection either.3

Mariko Takahashi and Toshikazu Hasegawa at the University of Tokyo in

Japan were determined to better understand what features of peacocks’ tails

made them most irresistible to peahens. To this end, they spent seven years

getting to know the flocks of peacocks and peahens in Izu Cactus Park in

Shizuoka. They carefully adjudicated the different breeding males’ tail

feathers, taking note of the size of the display and the number of eyespots

that males presented. There were clear differences among them, with some

males obviously having far grander tails than others.

By the end of the project, Takahashi’s team had observed 268 successful

matings. To their astonishment they found no correspondence between

mating success and any particular tail traits. The peahens mated as

enthusiastically and frequently with males that dragged underwhelming

displays behind them as they did with those that possessed the fanciest

tails.4

It could be that Takahashi’s team overlooked some feature of the tails and

the way individuals displayed. Peacock tails have qualities other than

eyespots and size, and we have at best only a tenuous idea of how peahens

and peacocks perceive the world around them through their senses.

Takahashi and colleagues think this is very unlikely though, which raises

the tantalizing possibility that some energy-expensive evolutionary traits

like peacock tails may have less to do with the battle to survive and

reproduce than may at first appear to be the case. The behavior of some

other species, like the serial builder and breaker of nests, the southern

masked weaver bird of southern Africa, suggests that the need to expend

energy may have played as important a role in shaping some traits as the

demands of capturing it.

Untangling the nest of a southern masked weaver, one of many species of

weaver birds in southern and central Africa, can be a challenge. Shaped like

a gourd and not much larger than an ostrich egg, their nests are one of the

avian world’s many engineering wonders. Beyond the smooth woven

symmetry of their ovulate grass and reed walls, masked weavers’ nests are

light enough to hang from a small twig, yet robust enough to shrug off the

frantic winds and the pebble-heavy raindrops that test them during summer

thunderstorms. For humans, at least, untangling a weaver’s nest is easiest to

do by stomping on it with your boots. Our fingers are too big and too

clumsy. But for diminutive southern masked weaver birds, brute force is not

an option.

Humans rarely have much cause to untangle weavers’ nests, but for some

reason male masked weavers do. Over the course of any summer, male

weavers build sequences of new, structurally near-identical nests, one after

the other, which they then destroy with the same diligence that they apply

when building them. They do this using their small conical beaks like a pair

of tweezers to first unbind the nest from the tree and then, once it plummets

to the ground, to methodically unpick it, one blade of grass at a time, until

nothing remains.

A male masked weaver in the final stages of completing a nest

Breeding male masked weavers are a riot of vivid yellows and golds.

This species owes its name to the distinctive patch of black plumage that

extends from just above their red eyes down to the base of their throats and

that resembles a bandit’s mask. Female masked weavers by contrast don’t

build nests or have black masks. They are camouflaged from beak to claw

by olive and khaki plumage that blends into a yellowish belly.

An industrious male masked weaver will build around twenty-five nests

in a single season, in the hope of attracting a small harem of females to

occupy some and later present him with clutches of eggs. One individual

weaver’s life in a garden in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, was diligently

documented over a period of several years in the 1970s. As unlucky in love

as he was hard-working, he ended up destroying 158 of the 160 nests he

built, one-third of them within a couple of days of weaving in the final grass

thread.5

Masked weavers’ nests are complex, energy-intensive constructions. It

can take up to a week to build a nest, although some gifted builders can

produce one in a day if there are enough of the right building materials

nearby. Researchers trying to get to grips with the energy costs incurred in

nest building by a closely related species, the village weaver in Congo,

estimated that individual males fly on average eighteen miles to gather the

more than 500 individual pieces of grass and reed needed to construct a

nest.6

During the 1970s, a long-term research project on southern masked

weavers was the first to suggest that there was perhaps something more to

weavers building nests than feathered automata processing genetic code.7

This study revealed that in much the same way that an infant human will

develop motor skills by manipulating and playing with objects, male

weaver chicks will play and experiment with building materials soon after

they emerge from their eggs and, through a process of trial and error,

progressively master the threading, binding, and knot-making skills

necessary to build nests. Later, when researchers were able to analyze the

masked weavers’ endeavors by setting up a series of cameras and filming

over a period of months, an even more complicated picture was revealed. It

showed that weaver birds got progressively quicker and better at building

nests—in other words more skilled—and that individual weavers developed

idiosyncratic nest-building techniques and so were not working to a

program.8

Masked weavers do not conceal their nests from potential predators. If

anything, they draw attention to them by building them on exposed

branches with the goal of catching the eye of a passing female masked

weaver. And whenever a female masked weaver comes anywhere near a

nest, a male will stop his work to preen and show off to try to persuade her

to inspect his nest. If she does, and subsequently decides a nest is to her

liking, the male will then add a short entrance tunnel at its base so the

female can move in and spruce up the interior in preparation for laying a

clutch of eggs.

Local folklore in much of southern Africa holds that male weavers only

destroy a nest when a fussy female has inspected it and found it somehow

wanting. Careful observation suggests this is not true. Not only do males

habitually destroy many of their nests without any female appraisal of their

workmanship, but it also seems that females make their decisions based

more on the location of a nest rather than the workmanship. A poorly

manufactured nest made by an indigent and clumsy male in the right place

is far more likely to attract a female than a well-built nest made by a strong,

skilled, and energetic weaver in the wrong place.

There is no doubt these sturdy constructions improve the survival

chances of masked weaver eggs and offspring. As easy as they are to spot,

snakes, hawks, monkeys, and crows struggle to reach them. Suspended

from springy, light, leaf-stripped twigs that bend precipitously under a little

additional weight, a nest is hard for any predator to reach, let alone to

access the recessed central chamber through the cavity on the underside

without first plummeting to the ground.

But its advantageous design offers no insights into the weaver’s

determination to produce near-identical nests one after another, like a potter

obsessively churning out the same vase again and again. Nor does it

account for their single-minded determination to destroy sequences of

perfectly good nests soon after completing them like a potter driven to

destroy vases because of imperfections that only she can see. If the energy

quest was paramount, then surely weavers would have evolved to build one

or two quality nests in the right place, rather than expending huge amounts

of energy building and then needlessly destroying dozens of them? And if

their ability to build lots of nests was an index of their individual fitness,

then why would they destroy them with such diligence?

Old Jan, a Ju/’hoan man who spent many hours idly watching weavers in

the Kalahari, speculated that the reason they destroy their nests with such

fierce determination is because they have very poor memories. So poor that

once an individual becomes focused on building his next nest and glimpses

one of his previous efforts out of the corner of his eye, he immediately

concludes that it was built by a love rival trying to muscle in on his turf and

destroys it to drive the phantom impostor away.

He may be right, but another Ju/’hoan weaver-watcher, Springaan,

expressed a far more intriguing view. He speculated that weavers were “like

my wife.” She simply couldn’t bear to loiter about doing nothing in the

same way her husband did. As a result, whenever she had a free moment

from her chores, she would busily make pieces of beaded jewelry, one after

the other, all based on a similar criss-cross design and crafted using the

same set of well-practiced tricks and techniques. And whenever she ran out

of beads, because they rarely had money to purchase more, she would

diligently unpick older completed pieces—often very beautiful ones—one

bead at a time and then repurpose them into new ones. He was of the view

that this was a great virtue and that he was lucky to have persuaded such a

woman to marry him, a woman who, like a weaver, found pride, joy, and

peace in the skill, craft, and artistry of making beautiful objects. She, on the

other hand, was not so sure that she was lucky to have married him.

Nest-building-and-destroying weaver birds may seem unusually

profligate with energy. But they are by no means the only species besides us

inclined to spend energy on apparently pointless work. The avian kingdom

alone is blessed with thousands of similar examples of expensive

elaboration, from the grandiose plumage of birds of paradise to the over-

elaborate nests of bowerbirds.

Evolutionary biologists usually take a strictly utilitarian approach to

explain these behaviors. To them the history of life is basically a tale of sex

and death, and all the rest is window dressing. All traits that have survived

the mill of natural selection must, they insist, be accounted for ultimately in

terms of the extent to which they aid or diminish an organism’s chances of

survival or reproducing, by offering it some kind of competitive advantage

in the energy quest or the quest for a mate. They might argue that the reason

why weavers build and destroy sequences of nests is to signal their fitness

to prospective mates or to stay in top condition to avoid potential predators.

Strangely, however, we are reluctant to resort to similar explanations for

equally energy-profligate displays by humans. After all, many of the things

humans expend energy on—from building ever grander, more ostentatious

skyscrapers to running ultra-marathons—are hard to reconcile with

reproductive fitness or survival. Indeed, many of the things we do to expend

energy risk reducing our lifespans rather than extending them. It may well

be that the ultimate explanation for why weavers build with such profligacy

is that, like us, when they have surplus energy, they expend it by doing

work in compliance with the law of entropy.

It takes lots of energy to organize molecules into cells, cells into organs,

organs into organisms, and organisms into blooms, forests, flocks, schools,

herds, packs, colonies, communities, and cities. Organisms that are

profligate with energy, that work carelessly or inefficiently, often lose out

where and when energy resources are scarce or when external conditions

change suddenly as a result of climate or geology, or even an advantageous

adaptation by another species that recalibrates the dynamic of an ecosystem.

There are many examples in evolutionary history of species rapidly

discarding redundant, energy-expensive traits because of a change in

circumstances. If, for instance, you take a population of three-spine

sticklebacks—a small fish that evolved body armor to help protect them

from predators—and introduce them to a predator-free lake, then within a

few generations that population will cease to be armored because building

unnecessary armor is an energy-expensive business.9

But there are also many examples of creatures that have vestigial traits or

features that have long ceased to be obviously useful but that nevertheless

still exist and incur a measurable energy cost. Ostriches, emus, and other

flightless birds retain vestigial wings, whales have vestigial hind legs, boa

constrictors retain vestigial pelvises, and humans retain a range of vestigial

features, among them useless ear muscles, parts of our digestive system that

no longer perform any useful function, and a coccyx optimized for tails.

It is possible that the weavers’ nest-building-and-destroying habit is a

vestigial trait and that it once served some easily identifiable and important

purpose. A number of other closely related weaver species in Africa are

similarly obsessive nest builders and they all must have inherited this trait

from a common ancestor.

Southern masked weavers are omnivorous. They are as happy consuming

a large number of different seeds and grains as they are snacking on protein-

rich insects. And during the extended building season they spend hardly any

time at all specifically focused on foraging. In fact, they spend so little time

foraging that the research group who diligently tracked village weavers

over the course of an eight-month building season observed no focused

foraging behavior by males at all, despite their unrelenting focus on nest

building. They concluded that during the building season food was so

abundant that the weavers foraged casually while retrieving materials for

their nests by plucking10 energy-rich insects from the air and whatever

grains they encountered while scouting for building parts.

During dry late-winter months insect life all but disappears and southern

masked weavers have to work a lot harder to eat than they do in the

building season. How well individuals cope at this time of year determines

who will live to see another season and who will not. In other words, how

well or badly organisms cope during the toughest seasons is the primary and

most brutal driver of natural selection. The problem is that the very traits

that might benefit organisms at the toughest time of year, like being able to

eat every scrap of food you find, can be problematic during times of the

year when food is abundant.

Researchers curious about how the various passerine birds that regularly

eat from garden bird-feeders remain slim have suggested that, despite often

overeating, these birds have evolved mechanisms to manage their weight

but that limiting the amount of food they eat is not one of them. They

pointed out that when food is abundant, passerine birds “exercise” through

upping the intensity with which they sing, fly, and perform other routine

behaviors, in much the same way that humans expend energy by playing

sports or going for a run.11

One of the weaver’s favorite seasonal foods also offers an oblique insight

into another set of behaviors that we often imagine to be uniquely human

and that are emblematic of two of the great convergences in the history of

our relationship with work: the ability to grow food and to work

cooperatively in big, sprawling cities.

Southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert is home to the most enduring population

of hunter-gatherers anywhere. But it is also home to one of the world’s

oldest continuous farming lineages, one that has been cultivating its own

food and living in cities for 30 million years longer than our species has.

The telltale signs of these ancient farming communities take the form of

millions of high-rise buildings, each containing climate-controlled civic

areas, urban farms, nurseries, and royal quarters, all linked to one another

by networks of carefully maintained thoroughfares. These cities—some of

which are centuries old—are constructed from a cement of gold, white, and

red Kalahari sand. The tallest among them are six feet high and reach

irregularly toward the sky with the same grace as the spires on the Sagrada

Família, Gaudi’s famous basilica in Barcelona.

And similar to cities like Barcelona, they are also home to millions of

insomniac citizens—each of whom has a specific job to do. Beyond the fact

that the dwellers of these cities are much smaller than us, they are driven by

a work ethic that even the most industrious and ambitious Homo sapiens

could never dream to emulate. These termites eschew sleep in favor of

labor, and work without resting until the moment they die.

Most termites are manual laborers. Blind and wingless, they maintain and

build core civic structures, ensure the citywide climate-control systems are

operating optimally, and feed, water, and groom those in other professions

—the soldiers and the reproductives. They are also tasked with managing

the inner-city fungus farms on which their colonies depend. Located just

below the queen’s chambers, the fungus farms are where termites produce

the food that sustains a colony. Every night the workers leave the mound on

foraging expeditions, returning only when their guts are packed with grass

and wood chips. When they make it back to the mound they head to the

farming chambers. There, they defecate the partially digested wood and

grass, and set about molding this into maze-like structures seeded with

fungal spores that only thrive in the temperature-regulated darkness of the

mound’s bowels. Over time these fungi dissolve the tough cellulose in the

wood and grass, transforming it into an energy-rich food that the termites

can easily digest.

Soldier termites are no less myopically focused on job performance. The

instant an intruder alarm is sounded—in the form of pheromonic signals

passed from termite to termite, so creating paths for the soldiers to follow—

they rush to the front and sacrifice their lives without hesitation. And these

city-states have many enemies. Ants are frequent and persistent raiders.

They are similarly dismissive of the value of individual lives and their sole

strategy is to overcome the much larger termite soldiers by sheer weight of

numbers. Other beasts, much bigger than ants, also test the soldiers’ mettle.

These include pangolins, decked from head to claw in armor, the long-

tongued aardvarks with almost bizarrely muscular forequarters and talons

capable of tearing the near-rock-hard walls of the mound as if it is papier

mâché, and bat-eared foxes who make use of their super-hearing to zoom in

on workers leaving the mound in search of material for their farms at night.

And then there are the reproductives, the kings and queens, who are as

much slaves to their specialized roles as any other termites. Both are several

orders of magnitude larger than even the soldiers and their sole job is to

reproduce. Cosseted in chambers deep within the mound, theirs is a life of

sexual drudgery with the king diligently fertilizing the millions of eggs

produced by a queen. Beyond the mechanics of reproduction, biologists

think it likely that the queen has at least one slightly more regal role to play.

It is she who apportions jobs to new citizens, by secreting pheromones that

either inhibit or catalyze genes to express in different ways for workers,

soldiers, and future royalty.12

Mound-building termite species—which are common also in South

America and Australia—are successful because they repurpose their

environments to suit them. It is difficult to be sure when the evolutionary

ancestors of termites set off down the path of sophisticated communalism.

But it is certain that they do not live as they do as a result of a single genetic

mutation that transformed them into civically minded builders, beholden to

a royal couple and protected by soldiers who will sacrifice themselves for

the good of the mound. It was a gradual process. Just as each new

significant design iteration of their mounds modified the selective pressures

shaping termite evolution, so the new traits they evolved resulted in

additional modifications to the mounds, creating a feedback loop that

tethered the evolutionary history of termites ever closer to the work they did

in modifying their environment to meet their needs.

Species that form complex, intergenerational social communities, in

which individuals work together to secure their energy needs and

reproduce, often do different jobs, and occasionally even sacrifice

themselves for the good of the team, are described as eusocial rather than

merely social. The “eu-” is taken from the Greek

ὖ

, meaning “good,” to

emphasize the apparent altruism associated with these species.

Eusociality is rare in the natural world, even among other insects. All

termite species and most ant species are eusocial to varying degrees, but

fewer than 10 percent of bee species and only a very small proportion of the

many thousands of wasp species are truly eusocial. Outside of the insect

world, eusociality is even rarer. There is evidence of only one species of

truly “eusocial” marine animal—the snapping shrimp—which is more

famous for the wallop it can give with its lightning-fast pincers than for its

complicated social life. And while some highly social mammals, like the

Kalahari’s African wild dogs—who will hunt collaboratively on behalf of a

breeding alpha female—flirt with eusociality, besides humans there are only

two species of truly eusocial vertebrates: the naked mole rat of East Africa

and the Damaraland mole rats of the western Kalahari. Both of these

subterranean creatures have evolved to live in environments that they have

substantially modified. And, like termites, mole rat colonies host only a

single breeding pair and are hierarchical. Most eusocial mole rats are fated

to be “workers” and spend their lives foraging to feed themselves and the

“royal” reproductive couple, building and maintaining their infrastructure

and driving off (or being eaten by) predators.

Humans have always found analogies for their behavior in the natural

world. And when it comes to virtuous labor, eusocial insects have proved a

rich source of metaphors. Thus the New Testament instructs “sluggardly”

Christians to “go to the ant” and “consider her ways,”13 and it is now

commonplace to invoke the industriousness of termites or the busyness of

bees. But it is only from the European Enlightenment and, later, after

Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859 that people began to

routinely invoke what they considered to be the paramount scientific laws

that governed natural selection to account for or justify their behavior. And

in doing so, they elevated Herbert Spencer’s eloquent but unfortunate

description of natural selection as the “survival of the fittest” into the

mantra of the marketplace.

In 1879, Herbert Spencer lamented “how often misused words can generate

misleading thoughts.”14 He was writing about the apparent hypocrisy of

“civilized men” who are so often inhuman to others, yet glibly accused

others of barbarism. But he might just as easily have been writing about his

most famous quote, which by then had become a popular shorthand for

Darwinian evolution.

Few phrases have been so misused and generated such misleading

thoughts as “survival of the fittest,” an idea that has been invoked again and

again to justify corporate takeovers, genocides, colonial wars, and

playground spats, among many other things. Even if Spencer believed that

humankind held an exalted position in the animal kingdom, what he

intended when he coined the phrase was not that the strongest, the smartest,

and the hardest working were destined to succeed, but rather that those

organisms that are best adapted by the slow mill of evolution to “fit” into

any particular environmental niche will thrive, at the expense of those that

are less well adapted. Thus for Spencer, the lion along with the wildebeest,

the flea that hitched a ride in the lion’s ear, and the grass the wildebeest

consumed just before the lion, unburdened by any qualms, crushed its

throat, were all equally fit in their own way.

Even if Spencer only inadvertently painted evolution as something

resembling a brutal fight to the death, he was nevertheless persuaded that

organisms competed with one another for energy in much the same way that

main street retailers competed with one another for customers and cash.

Unlike Darwin, he also believed that the characteristics acquired by an

organism during its lifetime could be passed on to its offspring, and hence

that evolution was an engine for progress that resulted in ever greater

complexity and sophistication, because it meant a progressive weeding out

of the “unfit” by the fit. This meant that he was as fierce an advocate for

small government and free markets as he was a fierce critic of socialism and

social welfare in general, which he believed stifled human flourishing and,

worse still, artificially supported the “survival of the unfittest.”15

Darwin also believed that the competition for energy lay at the heart of

what he called “the struggle for existence.” But he did not see it as the only

driver of evolution. Beyond the fact that he insisted that sexual selection

meant that many species developed ostentatious energy-inefficient traits

purely for the sake of “according to their standard of beauty,”16 he also

insisted that natural selection was also shaped by co-adaptation. He noted,

for instance, how most plant species depended on birds, bees, and other

creatures for pollination and to distribute their seeds, and how parasites

depended on the health of their hosts, and how scavengers depended on

hunters.

“We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker

and mistletoe,” he explained in The Origin of Species, “and only a little less

plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or

feathers of a bird.”17

In the 150 years since Darwin published The Origin of Species, our

understanding of the evolutionary dance that shapes the destinies of

different organisms in various ecosystems has developed considerably.

When Darwin was writing, for instance, no one understood anything of the

molecular mechanism of genetic inheritance; the myriad interactions

occurring all the time between the near-invisible microorganisms (like

bacteria) that we now know comprise a much larger proportion of all living

biomass on earth than all living animals combined; or the extent to which

species that seem to have at first very little to do with one another might

depend on each other indirectly in order to survive or thrive.

Thus, in addition to describing species such as termites in a colony

cooperating with one another, biologists’ descriptions of ecosystems always

reveal vast dynamic networks of interspecies interactions and dependencies.

These relationships usually take the form of mutualism (symbiotic

relationships where two or more species benefit), commensalism (symbiotic

relationships where one species benefits but at no cost to the other), and

parasitism (where one species benefits at the expense of the host). Some

researchers have taken it further and suggested that the active avoidance of

competition may be as important a driver of speciation in evolution as

competition.18

Whether the avoidance of competition proves to be as important a driver

of natural selection as competition, there is no doubt that Spencer’s and

Darwin’s views were also shaped by the fact that they were both wealthy,

successful males living at the heart of the largest empire the world had ever

seen, and in an era when few people doubted that the human world was

animated by a whole sequence of concurrent competitions between

individuals, towns, businesses, races, cultures, states, kingdoms, empires,

and even scientific theories.

What is perhaps most strange about the invocation of competition as the

primary driver of our economies is that behind the masculine bluster of

ruthlessness, most businesses and businesspeople operate in a manner far

more similar to real ecosystems. This is why all big organizations, for

instance, have ambitions to function with the cooperative efficiency of

termite mounds; why most business leaders work to establish mutually

beneficial, “win–win” relationships with their suppliers, service providers,

and customers; and why, even in the countries that most enthusiastically

embrace the theology of free markets, a whole battery of antitrust laws exist

to prevent excessive cooperation in the form of collusion between

businesses, the creation of cartels, and other “anticompetitive behaviors.”

It is clear, however, that the version of Darwinism caricatured by

economists, politicians, and others in support of free markets does not have

much common with the way biologists now tend to think of relationships

between organisms in the natural world. It is also clear, as the busy-building

weavers remind us, that while success or failure in the energy quest will

always shape the evolutionary trajectory of any species, many hard-to-

explain animal traits and behaviors may well have been shaped by the

seasonal over-abundance of energy rather than the battle for scarce

resources, and that in this may lie a clue as to why we, the most energy-

profligate of all species, work so hard.

TOOLS AND SKILLS

Neither weaver birds nor termites are especially purposeful creatures—at

least as far as we can tell. It is unlikely that either species set about building

their nests or constructing monumental air-conditioned mounds with clear

visions of what they wish to achieve. But it is far harder to disentangle

purposefulness and purposiveness among some of the many creatures that

intentionally repurpose objects around them into tools, and then use those

tools to perform various jobs.

Tool use has now been documented in fifteen species of invertebrates,

twenty-four species of birds, and four species of non-primate mammals,

among them elephants and orcas.1 It is the twenty-two species of monkey

and five species of ape who routinely use tools for a variety of different

tasks that have generated the most research, because in them we see more

of ourselves.

Homo sapiens are by far the most prolific, expert, and versatile makers

and users of tools in the history of life. Almost everything we do involves a

tool of some sort, and occurs in a space that we have modified in some way

or another. Most of the energy humans capture now, over and above that

which we use to sustain our bodies and reproduce, is expended on using

tools to modify and transform the world around us.

The different things that our various evolutionary ancestors made were

all important milestones in the deep history of work. But we do not have to

rely on these objects alone to understand what kinds of work our

evolutionary ancestors did, and how that work in turn influenced human

evolution. The story of Homo sapiens’ ability to master skills from

microsurgery to masonry is written into our hands, arms, eyes, mouths,

bodies, and brains. It tells us not only that we are physically and

neurologically the product of the work our evolutionary ancestors did, but

also that, as individuals, we have evolved to be progressively remolded over

the course of our lives by the kinds of work we do. This means that the

fossilized bones of our evolutionary ancestors are also important milestones

in this story.

Genomic and archaeological evidence suggests that recognizably modern

humans have been living in Africa for at least 300,000 years. But it is often

hard to tell whether any individual set of ancient hominin bones belonged to

one of our direct ancestors, or whether they came from related groups

whose lineages later disappeared down evolutionary cul-de-sacs.

Paleoanthropologists are nevertheless quite confident that our species,

Homo sapiens, as well as Neanderthals and Denisovans, descended from

members of Homo heidelbergensis’ extended family, or another,

hypothesized, older lineage called Homo antecessor, sometime between

300,000 and 500,000 years ago. It is thought that Homo heidelbergensis

descended from the extended Homo erectus family between 600,000 and

800,000 years ago, who in turn descended from a branch of the Homo

habilis family 1.9 million years ago, who in turn descended from

Australopithecines probably around 2.5 million years ago. Australopithecus

looked like a cross between a chimp and a slouching Homo sapiens

teenager. But if you dressed up a young adult male Homo heidelbergensis in

jeans, a T-shirt, and designer shoes, and took care to cover the pronounced

ridge over his eyebrows with a generously sized cap, he wouldn’t draw

anything more than an occasional quizzical glance when strolling around a

university campus.

Inferring how our evolutionary ancestors lived and behaved from stone

tools and the other fragmented bric-a-brac they left behind requires some

imagination. It also requires some imagination to infer the many cognitive

and physical skills they must have acquired—skills like dancing, singing,

wayfinding, or tracking that leave few obvious material traces in the

archaeological record. And no ancient tool worked archaeologists’

imaginations more than the most widely used stone tool in human history,

the Acheulean hand-ax.

The quarrymen digging out gravel in the Lower Somme Valley, not far from

the town of Abbeville, France, had learned to listen carefully for the jingle

of francs that signaled a visit from the director of Abbeville’s customs

bureau, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes. Bored by his day job,

Boucher found joy and a sense of purpose squirreling around the gravel pits

in the valley in search of interesting “antiquarian” objects that he hoped

might reveal the secrets of the ancient world.

Boucher’s routine quarry visits began in 1830, after he showed a group of

quarrymen a chunk of flint that he had found during his own excavations. It

was twice the size of a human hand, with two symmetrical, slightly concave

faces that had been roughly worked into a teardrop shape and was

circumscribed by a sharp cutting edge. They recognized it instantly. It was

one of the langues de chat, “cat’s tongues,” that they occasionally found

buried in the gravel, often alongside old bones, and which they usually

discarded without much thought. They agreed in future to set aside any for

him, as long as he was prepared to show his gratitude in the form of a few

francs. It did not take long before some of them became proficient in

making reasonable facsimiles of the cat’s tongues themselves, to extract a

few extra francs from the customs director on his visits.2

An Acheulean hand-ax

Over the next decade Boucher gradually built up a sizable collection of

these curious flint rocks—many of which were not forgeries—and became

convinced that they had been sculpted into their near-symmetrical forms by

ancient humans who lived alongside the extinct beasts whose bones also

littered the gravel pits.

Boucher was not the first person to wonder about the origins of these

strange objects. The ancient Greeks, for example, also recognized their

artifice but, unable to establish any obvious reasons for their existence,

concluded they were “thunderstones”—the spear points of the lightning

bolts dispatched to earth by their god of gods, Zeus.

In 1847, Boucher proposed his theory that cat’s tongues had been

manufactured by long-dead ancients in a three-volume treatise, Les

Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes. Much to Boucher’s

disappointment, Les Antiquités Celtiques was dismissed as an amateurish

hotchpotch of clumsy description and outlandish theorizing. Charles

Darwin, for example, thought it was “rubbish,”3 a sentiment shared by

many of the grandees of the French Académie des Sciences in Paris. But

Boucher’s book nevertheless persuaded some members of the Académie,

most notably a young medical doctor, Marcel-Jérôme Rigollot, to

investigate these cat’s tongues for themselves. Over the next few years

Rigollot adopted Boucher’s strategy of harassing quarrymen up and down

the Lower Somme Valley to alert him as soon as they discovered any of

these objects. But, unlike Boucher, he insisted on digging most of them out

himself.

By 1855, Rigollot had diligently documented the recovery of hundreds of

cat’s tongues, many from a single quarry just outside St. Acheul near

Amiens. Many were retrieved in situ from undisturbed strata that also

contained ancient elephant and rhinoceros bones, leaving Rigollot in no

doubt that these pieces were of ancient origin.

If Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes were alive today, he would

probably be upset to learn that it is thanks to Rigollot’s carefully

documented discoveries at St. Acheul that cat’s tongues are now universally

known as Acheulean hand-axes, Acheulean bifaces, or, somewhat less

inspiringly, large cutting tools. Like the one Boucher showed the

quarrymen, these era-defining stone tools are typically pear-shaped or

ovate, and have sharpened edges that separate two well-worked, roughly

symmetrical, convex faces. Some are similar in size and shape to the space

that forms between your hands when, partially cupped and with fingers

extended, they are brought together as if in insincere prayer. But many are

twice as large, thicker than a quarryman’s clenched fist and very heavy.

They have been confusing and frustrating antiquarians, anthropologists,

and archaeologists ever since.

The reason hand-axes have generated such confusion is that they almost

certainly weren’t ever used as handheld axes. As robust, heavy-duty, and

up-to-the-job as these objects appear, holding one in your hand immediately

raises a practical problem. There is no obvious way to apply significant

force along any of the sharpened edges or through its point without other

sharp edges cutting into your fingers or your palm. This means that if you

try cleaving a log or fracturing a thick, marrow-rich bone with it, you

probably won’t be able to hold anything at all for some time afterward.

As the quarrymen in Abbeville discovered by trial and error, it is not

particularly hard to make a decent facsimile of an Acheulean hand-ax.

Archaeologists regularly replicate the method and have found pleasure in

watching generations of archaeology and anthropology students bloody

their knuckles while having a go as part of their university coursework. But

no one has worked out what they were used for. If hand-axes were rare then

we might be content to let this mystery rest, but so many hand-axes have

been found that it is hard to conclude anything other than that they were

Homo erectus’s go-to gadget.

Adding to the hand-ax’s mystery is the fact that Homo erectus and its

descendants hammered them out consistently for a period of 1.5 million

years, making them arguably the most enduring tool design in human

history. The oldest Acheulean hand-axes are African. These were

manufactured over 1.6 million years ago. The most recent are only 130,000

years old. These were probably hammered out by remnant populations of

Homo erectus, having been outgunned by cognitively sophisticated

hominins like Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, who by then made use of

fancy, hafted spears. While the skills of hand-ax makers improved gradually

over this million-and-a-half-year period, their core design and the basic

techniques required to manufacture them remained largely unchanged.

Even the most basic Acheulean hand-axes are a marked step up from the

clumsier efforts during the first era of widespread stone tool manufacture—

a period that paleontologists call the Oldowan. First discovered in

Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, the oldest samples of Oldowan stonework are

about 2.6 million years old. Homo habilis (“handy” human) owes its name

to the Oldowan-type tools that are closely associated with it, but making

Acheulean tools appears to have been the larger-brained Homo erectus’s gift

alone. Oldowan stone tools were until recently thought to represent our

evolutionary ancestors’ very first systematic efforts to repurpose rocks into

more immediately useful objects, but there is now some tentative evidence

that suggests that Australopithecus were amateur stonemasons too. In 2011,

researchers looking for samples of Acheulean industry around Lake

Turkana in East Africa’s Rift stumbled across a trove of rough stone tools,

which they estimate to be 700,000 years older than any previously

discovered.

There is some skill involved in making Oldowan tools. Even so, most of

them look like rocks that have been optimistically beaten up in the hope of

creating useful points or cutting edges. They do not look like the products

of well-organized minds working to realize a clear vision. Making an

Acheulean hand-ax, by contrast, is a complex, multi-stage process. It

requires finding an appropriate rock—not just any rock will do—then

hammering a workable, roughly ovulate core from it with a heavy hammer

stone, before progressively smoothing and shaping its faces and edges using

smaller hammer stones in combination with softer bone or horn hammers.

In silent witness to the skill required to manufacture one, almost

everywhere that hand-axes have been found in significant numbers, among

them are the remains of hundreds of other fatally fractured hand-axes, each

a casualty of an inaccurate or overpowered hammer blow.

Ju/’hoan hunter’s kit. From left to right: club; poison arrow; spear; springhare hunting hook;

digging stick; and bow.

Some anthropologists have speculated that hand-axes weren’t used as

tools in and of themselves but rather as solid-state toolboxes from which

small, sharp rock flakes could conveniently be struck whenever a cutting

edge was needed, and that over time the removal of flakes from a single

rock produced the aesthetically pleasing symmetrical hand-ax shape. But

the wear on hand-ax edges shows that, as unwieldy as they are, Homo

erectus almost certainly did more with them than flake off small sharp

blades. As a result, most archaeologists have half-heartedly concluded that,

as unwieldy and unpractical as they seem, hand-axes were probably used

for many different jobs, and so they were the Swiss army knife of the

Acheulean era.

In the absence of any hand-ax-wielding Homo erectus to show us precisely

what jobs they did with them, hand-axes are destined to remain

archaeological orphans. However, a different perspective on the hand-ax

conundrum may be found in the invisible archaeology of our evolutionary

past: the tools and other items our ancestors made from organic materials

like wood that have since decomposed and left no trace.

Hunter-gatherers need to be mobile, and mobility demands not having

too much heavy stuff to carry from one camp to the next. This is one of the

many reasons why foragers had very frugal material cultures. Most of the

tools they manufactured were made from light, organic, easily worked

materials like wood, leather, sinew, rawhide, plant fiber, horn, and bone.

Before iron began to find its way into the Kalahari via the farming

communities that settled on the Kalahari’s fringes some 800 years ago,

people like the Ju/’hoansi used stone flakes affixed with gum or sharpened

bone as arrowheads, and stone flakes and blades for cutting. Stone, in other

words, was critical, but nevertheless formed only a minor part of their

inventories. Even if our evolutionary ancestors from Australopithecus to

Homo heidelbergensis made far fewer tools than twentieth-century foragers

did, the likelihood is that most of these were made from wood, grass, and

other organic materials.

One particular tool was ubiquitous among twentieth-century foragers: the

digging stick. The Ju/’hoan version of this tool is made from a thick,

straight branch of Grewia, a hardwood bush that grows in abundance all

through the Kalahari. These are usually a little over three feet long,

sharpened into a flattened point set at an incline of about 25 degrees and

then tempered in hot sand. As its name suggests, a digging stick is a very

good tool for digging out roots and tubers, especially in heavily compacted

sand. More than this, though, it is also a walking stick, a tool for clearing

paths through thorns, a spear, a club, and a projectile.

Even without archaeological evidence for it, there is a strong case to be

made that this rudimentary tool—basically a sturdy, sharpened stick—rather

than the hand-ax is the most enduring of all human technologies in our

evolutionary history. Given that savannah chimps in Senegal use small,

intentionally sharpened sticks to skewer bush babies, it is almost certain

that the systematic use of sharpened sticks predates the emergence of stone

tools.

When exposed to the elements, organic material will decompose

aerobically, a process often accelerated thanks to the attentions of various

scavengers, insects, funguses, and bacteria. A dead animal’s soft tissue

always decomposes first, and even an elephant carcass can be stripped of

flesh and its bones shattered by hyena jaws in a matter of days. Lignin (the

substance that gives wood its strength) might take a few hundred years to

return to dust in very favorable, dry conditions, and large bones, a few

thousand years. In humid conditions, though, wood and bone decompose

rapidly. When dead organic material is trapped in an oxygen-poor

environment, like glutinous mud, it will often take longer to decompose, but

in time it will also be broken down by specialized anaerobic acid-producing

microorganisms called acetogens.

On rare occasions, though, chance conspires to help organic material to

survive a very long time indeed.

In 1994, archaeologists from the State Service for Cultural Heritage in

Germany’s Lower Saxony received a call from geologists at an open-pit

coal mine near Schöningen, who reported that they had found what

appeared to be a deposit of significant archaeological interest. The

geologists turned out to be right. Over the following four years the cultural

heritage team exhumed the bones of twenty ancient wild horses, as well as

several long-extinct European bison and red deer. Some of the bones had

bite marks left by some ancient predators, but of greater interest to the team

was the fact that many of the bones also showed obvious evidence of

butchery by human hand. Evidence of large-scale, well-organized ancient

butchery is rare enough to have made this a significant discovery, but the

nine uniquely well-preserved wooden spears archaeologists retrieved from

among the bones, one of which was still embedded in a horse’s pelvis bone,

assured its fame. Alongside these they also retrieved something resembling

a digging stick, a lance, and a smallish trove of flint tools, several of which

looked as if they were designed to be hafted onto spears.

The presence of well-preserved wooden artifacts suggested at first that

these deposits were unlikely to be more than 50,000 years old. But

radiocarbon dating later revealed that they were probably abandoned in the

mud of an ancient lake sometime between 300,000 and 337,000 years ago,

making them far older than any wooden artifact found up to then.4 The

proximity of a nearby chalk pit had meant the mud they were buried in was

too alkaline for acetogenic bacteria to do their work.

Despite having partially buckled under the mud’s weight they were

buried in, there is no mistaking the skill and experience that went into

making them. Each spear was made from a single, straight, lean spruce stem

that had been carefully whittled, scraped, and smoothed into a projectile

with gently tapering points at each end that extended from a thicker center.

More than this, each spear had a center of gravity in the front third of the

shaft and, as a result, closely resembled the javelins used by modern

athletes.

Curious about their aerodynamic properties, the archaeologists made

some replicas of the Schöningen spears and asked some international-level

javelinists to give them a go. The longest throw the athletes managed was

seventy meters, a distance sufficient to have won a gold medal in every

Olympic Games up until 1928.5

After four years of digging and analysis, the State Service archaeologist

who led the excavation at Schöningen, Hartmut Thieme, reached the

conclusion that what they had found was a large-scale hunting and carcass-

processing site and, correspondingly, that the makers of these spears—most

probably Neanderthals—were very socially sophisticated.

At a little over 300,000 years old, the javelins do not represent a new

threshold of innovation in tool manufacturing. There are plenty of

contemporaneous artifacts that suggest that by then many humans had

graduated from Acheulean technology. These spears are important because

they tell of a highly evolved tradition of woodwork. It is for no other reason

than the durability of stone that we define the longest era in human

technological history by reference to lithic technologies, which at best offer

no more than a half-glimpse into one aspect of our evolutionary ancestors.

Of all the organic materials that were readily available to Homo erectus

to use as tools, only bone, ivory, and shell are sufficiently hard-wearing to

endure over many millennia. Clam shells were used as cutting tools by

Homo erectus in East Asia, the only part of the world where they showed

no interest in bashing out endless hand-axes. Beyond some evidence

suggesting that bone tools were used to prize open termite mounds at

Swartkrans, a site in South Africa, perhaps as long as 1.5 million years ago,

there is surprisingly little evidence of hominins systematically repurposing

bones into tools until around 300,000 years ago when people started to

occasionally shape hand-axes from elephant bones.6 This may well be

because bones degrade far more easily than stone and that working them

can hasten their decomposition. It may also be simply because bones were

abundant and came pre-made in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so didn’t need

to be reworked to be particularly useful. A straight tibia from any number

of species makes a handy club that can be repurposed into a simple

hammer, masher, or pounder; rib bones from fowl are great for prizing

snails from their shells; the jawbone of an ass, as the biblical Samson

discovered, is useful for smiting enemies; and, as anyone who has cracked a

large uncooked bone in search of marrow inside will know, when the bone

fractures it almost always produces a series of lethal, very sharp, strong

points and edges capable of stabbing or cutting.

Except on the few days a year when it is drenched by thunderstorms,

everything in Kathu, a small town in South Africa’s northern Cape

Province, is usually coated with a fine layer of dust, much of which drifts in

on the wind from massive open-pit iron mines just outside town. The

miners are not the first people to have spent time and energy digging in the

red soils here in search of iron-rich rocks. People were doing the same thing

hundreds of thousands of years before anyone imagined that iron ore might

be extracted, refined, melted, and molded into any number of useful objects.

Recently, archaeologists have been digging here, too, mainly at a site they

have since named “Kathu Pan.”

Over the last four decades, Kathu Pan has yielded a sequence of startling

archaeological finds. Among the most important of them is the strongest

evidence yet to suggest that late Homo erectus or possibly Homo

heidelbergensis made clever composite tools from both stone and wood—a

technology that was until recently thought to have only been developed

during the last 40,000 years.7

No less significant than the evidence for composite tools, though, is

another, older, item recovered from this site, the unimaginatively named

“Kathu Pan hand-ax.” Found adjacent to the tooth-plates of an extinct

species of elephant, it was probably made by a relative of Homo erectus

sometime between 750,000 and 800,000 years ago. Cut from a shimmering

chunk of tiger-striped ironstone and shaped like a teardrop, this particular

hand-ax is nothing like the many other well-made contemporary hand-axes

found at Kathu Pan. Where the other hand-axes are solid, functional,

practical, and workmanlike, this one is a piece of virtuoso craftsmanship.

Close to 1 foot from base to tip and around 4 inches at its widest point, it is

a work of great symmetry, balance, and precision. But, where a basic hand-

ax can be fashioned by a well-practiced stonecutter with a dozen strikes,

this one is the product of hundreds of precise, skillful blows.

The Kathu Pan hand-ax maintains a stony silence about why it was made

and what it was used for. But, as a praise-poem to its maker’s skill, it is

eloquent. Each indentation in the hand-ax holds not just the memory of its

maker’s fingers judging the symmetry of its curved, convex faces, but also

the memory of each individual stone flake and the hammer blow which

cleaved them from the banded ironstone core.

No matter how much opportunity it is given to practice, a gorilla or chimp

is unlikely ever to bash out a half-decent hand-ax, let alone fashion one as

elegant as the Kathu Pan hand-ax. Nor is one likely to write a book or play

a decent piano solo. Homo sapiens by contrast can master an extraordinary

array of different skills, which in each case, once mastered, masquerades as

instinct. An accomplished pianist will transform a melody in their mind into

sound without having to consciously map out a sequence for their fingers to

follow, just as a skilled soccer player will hammer a ball into the top corner

of a forty-yard-distant goal without any conscious thought about the

complex mechanics involved in doing so.

Mastering a skill sufficiently well for it to masquerade as an instinct

takes time and energy, and lots of work. The rudiments of it must first be

learned, usually by means of a combination of instruction, imitation, and

experimentation. Then it must be practiced, often for years, before it

becomes second nature. Acquiring skills also requires energy, dexterity, and

cognitive processing power, as well as some less tangible qualities that

scientists are far more wary of discussing than poets: perseverance, desire,

determination, imagination, and ambition.

Homo sapiens’ ability to acquire and master skills as different as

shooting arrows with lethal accuracy and performing microsurgery is

written into our hands, arms, eyes, and body shapes. Not only are we the

product of the different kinds of work our ancestors did and the skills they

acquired, but we are also shaped progressively over the course of our lives

by the different kinds of work we do.

Over time, our evolutionary ancestors’ growing dependency on tools

redirected their evolutionary trajectory by progressively selecting in favor

of bodies better optimized to make and use tools. Among the most obvious

legacies of Homo habilis’s determined but ham-fisted efforts to fashion

rocks and other objects into useful tools are dextrous hands that can thread a

needle; opposable thumbs capable of gripping and manipulating objects;

shoulders and arms uniquely well designed for accurately hurling

projectiles; eyes in the front of our heads that help us to judge the distance

between two objects; and finely tuned motor skills that bring these qualities

together.

But the most important and far-reaching physiological legacies of tool

use are neurological.

The folds of white and gray matter that sit in our skulls are far more

enigmatic than Acheulean hand-axes. And despite the fact that clever

machines can now track, analyze, and chart each electrical pulse that fires

our neurons or tickles our synapses, these organs cling on to their secrets far

more obstinately than, for instance, our livers, lungs, and hearts. But they

reveal just enough to show that the interactions between our bodies and our

environments not only shape and sculpt our brains as we age, but also that

the acquisition of skills like making and using tools, or reading tracks in the

sand, modified the selective pressures that determined the course of our

ancestors’ evolution. This is made plain by the fact that the bulk of the

energy surplus acquired through using tools and cooking that might

otherwise have been directed toward making our ancestors grow bigger,

stronger, quicker, or more toothsome was instead directed toward building,

remodeling, and maintaining ever bigger, more complex, and plastic brains,

and reorganizing our bodies to accommodate these exceptionally large

lumps of neural tissue.

Brain size relative to body size is a useful but crude index of general

intelligence, as is brain organization. There is, for example, a broad

correspondence between the general intelligence of any species and the

size, shape, and folding of the neocortex—a neurological feature most

developed in mammals. But from the perspective of the capacity to acquire

skills, what is most interesting is the series of neurological transformations

that take place over the course of our childhoods, through adolescence and

beyond, which enable our physical interactions with the world around us to

physically reconfigure aspects of our neural architecture.

Where most animal species have evolved a series of highly specialized

capabilities honed over generations of natural selection, enabling them to

exploit specific environments, our ancestors shortcut this process by

becoming progressively more plastic and more versatile. In other words,

they became skilled at acquiring skills.

Most mammals can move independently soon after birth. Whales and

other cetaceans, who have comparable lifespans to humans when not being

harpooned for high-end steak and “scientific research,” are born competent

swimmers; most hoofed mammals can walk, and all infant primates—save

humans—are able to cling to their mother’s back or neck with fierce

determination from the moment they leave the womb. Homo sapiens

newborns, by contrast, are helpless and have to be held if they demand

physical contact; they are characterized by their near-complete dependency

on adult care for years. Newborn chimpanzees’ brains are close to 40

percent of adult size, but grow to nearly 80 percent of adult size within a

year. Newborn Homo sapiens’ brains are around one-quarter of the size

they will achieve at adulthood and only begin to approach adult size when

they reach the early stages of puberty. Partly this is an adaptation to enable

them to escape their mothers’ wombs through birth canals dangerously

constricted by the demands of walking upright. It is also because, to

develop properly, infant Homo sapiens’ brains depend on sensory-rich

environments more than the gentle safety of the womb.

As helpless as Homo sapiens newborns are, their brains are all business.

Assaulted by a noisy, smelly, tactile, and, after some weeks, visually vibrant

universe of stimuli, infancy is the period when brain development is at its

most frenzied, as new neurons bind themselves into synapses to filter

meaning from a chaos of sensory stimuli. This process continues all through

childhood until early adolescence, by which time children have twice as

many synapses as they were born with and brains fired by fantastical, often

absurd, imaginations. Basic skills acquired during this period of life are

unsurprisingly the ones that feel most intuitive and instinctive in later years.

At the onset of puberty, our bodies chip away at the mass of synaptic

connections formed during infancy and early childhood, so that by the time

we reach adulthood most of us have half the number of synapses we did

when we entered puberty. This process of synaptic pruning is as critical to

adult brain development as the earlier period of growth. It is during this

time that the brain streamlines itself to better meet environmental

requirements and focus energy resources where they are needed most, by

leaving under-utilized synaptic connections to atrophy and die.

The process by which our brains are molded by our lived environments

doesn’t end there. Neurological reorganization and development continue

into early adulthood and into our dotage even if as we age the process tends

to be driven more by decline rather than growth or regeneration. Ironically

our species’ extraordinary plasticity when young and the extent to which it

declines as we get older also accounts for why as we age we become more

stubbornly resistant to change; why habits acquired when we are young are

so hard to break when we are old; why we tend to imagine that our cultural

beliefs and values are a reflection of our fundamental natures; and why

when others’ beliefs and values clash with our own, we slander them as

unnatural or inhuman.

But what of our evolutionary ancestors? Were they similarly plastic when

young and set in their ways when old? And might the evolution of plasticity

explain why our ancestors soldiered on with their hand-axes for so long?

The fossil record shows unambiguously that in our lineage evolution

consistently selected in favor of individuals with bigger brains with bigger

neocortices until around 20,000 years ago when, mysteriously, our

ancestors’ brains began to shrink. But the fossil record is far more

parsimonious about how quickly or slowly our different ancestors’ brains

developed over the course of their individual lifetimes. Genomic studies in

the future may well offer some new insights into this. In the meantime,

though, we have little option but to stare at objects like hand-axes and ask

why, after making them diligently for a million years, our ancestors

suddenly abandoned them 300,000 years ago in favor of more versatile

tools made with a series of new techniques.

One possible answer is that our ancestors were genetically shackled to

hand-ax design in much the same way that different species of birds are

genetically shackled to specific designs of nest. If so, Homo erectus and

others diligently made hand-axes while operating on instinctive autopilot

with only a vague sense of why,8 until some 300,000 years ago they

suddenly crossed a critical genetic Rubicon that spontaneously ushered in a

new era of innovation.

Another possible answer reveals itself if we abandon the idea that

intelligence is a single generalized trait and instead view it as a collection of

different cognitive traits, which evolved, initially at least, to do different

jobs in response to different adaptive pressures. Thus problem solving can

be thought of as one form of intelligence responsive to a particular set of

adaptive pressures, abstract reasoning another, spatial reasoning another,

and the ability to acquire and absorb socially transmitted information

another still.

If so, then Homo erectus may have clung on so doggedly to the hand-ax

design because the ability to learn from others was a far more beneficial

adaptation at first than problem solving. Cognitively plastic creatures, like

most terrestrial mammals, cephalopods, and some species of birds, all learn

from experience. But on its own plasticity has some obvious limitations. It

requires that each individual learn the same lessons from scratch and so

repeat the same energy-costly, sometimes fatal, mistakes of their ancestors.

But when they are combined with traits associated with social learning,

however, the advantages of plasticity are amplified many times over,

because beneficial learned behaviors—like avoiding poisonous snakes or

knowing what hand-axes are useful for—can be transmitted across

generations with no cost and minimal risk.

We may not know what Homo erectus did with their hand-axes, but they

certainly did know. And they would have acquired this insight when young

by watching others use them. It is inconceivable that Homo erectus didn’t

also acquire many other skills as a result of watching and imitating others.

Some of these would have been technical, like fashioning a good digging

stick, jointing and butchering a carcass, and possibly even preparing a fire.

Others would have been behavioral, like learning to track an animal or

soothe others with their voices or touch.

The fact that our languages are more than a collection of words and are

governed by rules of syntax that enable us to purposefully convey complex

ideas may well have arisen in parallel with tool-making. To convey an idea

effectively, words need to be organized into the right order. Many gorillas

and chimpanzees, like Koko, who have lived in human-dominated

environments, have mastered working vocabularies of several thousand

words, and vervet monkeys make distinct vocal signals to warn of the

presence and location of different kinds of predators. So it is reasonable to

assume that Australopithecus had the brains to do so too. But it is a big step

up from shouting accurate warnings to singing love songs, because

language requires that words are organized according to a series of complex

grammatical rules. This requires neural circuits that integrate both sensory

perception and motor control as well as the ability to follow a hierarchy of

operations. In just the same way that this sentence only makes sense

because words are presented in a particular order, so the process of making

tools requires that a specific hierarchy of operations is followed. You cannot

make a spear without first making a spearhead, preparing a shaft, and

finding the materials you need to bind them together. Language processing

was long thought to be the exclusive function of a highly specialized and

anatomically discrete module within the brain—Broca’s area—but it is now

clear that Broca’s area also plays a substantial role in non-linguistic

behaviors, like tool-making and tool use,9 which means it is possible that

selective pressures associated with making and using tools may have been

instrumental in language’s early development.

George Armitage Miller lived in a world of words. Every object that fell

into his vision and every word he heard instantly set off a cascade of

associations, synonyms, and antonyms that flashed through his mind. A

psychologist with an interest in understanding the cognitive processes

behind language and information processing, he founded the Center for

Cognitive Studies at Harvard. And, in 1980, long before digital networks

were part of everyday life, he was the driving force behind the development

of Wordnet, a still functioning online database that details the myriad

lexical relationships between most words in the English language.

But for a while in 1983 he was stuck looking for a word to describe the

relationship between living organisms and information. A fan of Erwin

Schrödinger’s What Is Life?, Miller was certain that Schrödinger had left

something important out of his definition of life. In order for living

organisms to consume free energy per entropy’s demands, Miller insisted,

they had to be able to find it, and to find it they had to have the ability to

acquire, interpret, and then respond to useful information about the world

around them. It meant, in other words, that a significant proportion of the

energy they captured was expended seeking out information using their

senses and then processing it in order to find and capture more energy.

“Just as the body survives by ingesting negative entropy [free energy],”

Miller explained, “so the mind survives by ingesting information.”10

Miller didn’t find the word he was looking for to describe organisms that

ingest information, and so he coined a new one, “informavores.” He

originally intended it only to apply to “higher organisms” like us, with

energy-hungry nervous systems and brains, but it is now clear that all living

things, from prokaryotes to plants, are informavores. Thus, for example,

bacteria in a puddle may not even have the physical apparatus with which to

think, but like a plant bending its leaves to catch sunlight, they are able to

respond to stimuli signaling the proximity of energy sources around them,

and if there aren’t any, to seek them out.

Much of the energy captured by complex organisms with brains and

nervous systems is used to filter, process, and respond to information

acquired through their senses. In all cases, though, when the information is

deemed irrelevant it is usually instantly disregarded. But when it is not, it is

usually a trigger for action. For a cheetah, the sight of easy prey switches it

into hunting mode in just the same way that the sight of a cheetah’s tail will

send a gazelle running. Many species, however, have the ability not just to

respond instinctively to acquired information, but to learn, like Pavlov’s

dogs, to respond quasi-instinctively to specific stimuli. And some also have

the ability to choose how to respond on the basis of a combination of

instinct and learned experience. Thus when a hungry jackal encounters lions

resting near a recent kill, it will calculate the risks of robbing a bone of

meat from the carcass by cautiously testing the lions’ vigilance and mood

before making a decision on whether or not to dive in.

With our super-plastic neocortices and well-organized senses, Homo

sapiens are the gluttons of the informavore world. We are uniquely skilled

at acquiring, processing, and ordering information, and uniquely versatile

when it comes to letting that information shape who we are. And when we

are deprived of sensory information, like a prisoner in solitary confinement,

we conjure sometimes fantastical information-rich worlds from the

darkness to feed our inner informavore.

It does not require a great deal of brain to keep our various organs, limbs,

and other bodily bits and pieces running as they should. The vast majority

of the energy-expensive tissue in our skulls is devoted to processing and

organizing information. We are also almost certainly unique in terms of the

amount of heat-generating work these otherwise immobile organs do, by

generating electric pulses when mulling over the often trivial information

our senses gather. Thus when we sleep we dream; when we are awake we

constantly seek out stimulation and engagement; and when we are deprived

of information we suffer.

Large primates are already outliers in the animal world in terms of the

amount of raw physical work their brains do, just by processing and

organizing information. And in our lineages’ evolutionary history, each

surge in brain growth signaled a surge in our ancestors’ appetite for

information and the amount of energy they expended in processing it.

Because of how much urban-dwelling Homo sapiens interact with other

humans, the bulk of research into the implications of plasticity in the human

evolutionary story has focused on its role in the development of skills like

language, which enables the transmission of cultural knowledge and helps

individuals navigate complex social relationships. Surprisingly, however,

given the fact that our ancestors may well have only become highly skilled

language users relatively late in our evolutionary history, far less attention

has been given to the skills they developed to process non-linguistic

information. These would have been acquired and developed through

observing, listening, touching, and interacting with the world around them.

Hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari did not doubt the importance of

culturally transmitted information. Knowing, for example, which plants

were good to eat and when they were ripe, or which tubers and melons

contained sufficient liquid to sustain a hunter were essential to survival.

When it came to matters like hunting, some important knowledge could be

transmitted using words—like where one might find some diamphidia

larvae to poison an arrowhead, or which animal sinews made the best

bowstrings. But the most important forms of knowledge could not. This

kind of knowledge, they insisted, could not be taught because it resided not

just in their minds but also in their bodies, and because it found expression

in skills that could never be reduced to mere words.

We can of course only speculate what these individual skills were.

Wayfinding and navigation were very likely among them. As was the ability

to read the behavior of potentially dangerous animals and situations, and to

calculate and manage risk. And for hunters it almost certainly involved the

ability to infer detailed information from nothing more than animal tracks in

the sand, and use this to put meat in their bellies.

For a few hours after dawn, animal tracks decorate the sand in the Kalahari

Desert like letters typed in a hundred different fonts and sizes, arranged into

a chaos of continuous intersecting lines. For all but a few species, night is

the busiest time in the Kalahari and each morning the stories of their

nocturnal adventures are written briefly in the sand for those who know

how to read them.

When the sun gets higher and the shadows shorten, the tracks become

much harder to see, and harder still to recognize. For a skilled tracker,

though, it makes little difference. Like reading a sentence in which a few

letters or words have been blacked out, or listening to familiar words in an

unfamiliar accent, they use their intuition to first infer and then find hard-to-

see tracks from those that came before.

To foraging Ju/’hoansi, tracks are an endless source of amusement, and

human footprints are observed as carefully as animal ones—something that

in Ju/’hoansi communities continues to make life as tricky for clandestine

lovers as it does for thieves.

Adults often shared the stories they read in the sand with children, but

they did not make any special efforts to teach their children tracking.

Instead they quietly encouraged children to acquire these skills by

observing and interacting with the world around them. Armed with mini

sets of bows and arrows, boys would spend their days stalking and hunting

the various insects, lizards, fowl, and rodents that scurried invisibly through

their camps. This, adults explained, taught the boys to “see” and so

prepared them for adolescence when they would begin to gradually master

the more rarefied skill of entering the perceptive universe of any animal

they tracked—the difference between a successful hunt and failure.

Ju/’hoansi hunters experience the desert as a vast interactive canvas

animated by the tales of different animals who inscribe their comings and

goings in the sand. Like poetry, tracks have a grammar, a meter, and a

vocabulary. But also like poetry, interpreting them is far more complex and

nuanced than simply reading sequences of letters and following them where

they lead. To unpack the layers of meaning in any individual set of tracks

and establish who made it and when, what the animal was doing, where it

was going and why, hunters must perceive the world from the perspective

of the animal.

Among Ju/’hoansi, a hunter’s skill is not only measured by his

perseverance or his accuracy with his bow. It is measured by his ability

firstly to find an animal—often by tracking it for miles—and then to be able

to approach close enough to ensure a decent shot. Doing so, they insist, is

only possible if you enter the mind of the animal and perceive the world

through its senses, and the way to do this is through its tracks.

In most of the Kalahari, there are no hills or elevated points from which

to spot game grazing on the plains below, and the bush is often too thick to

see much further than a few yards ahead. Here you can hunt the big meat-

animals—like eland, oryx, or hartebeest—without any weapons or tools at

all, but not without being able to read stories written in the sand.

No Ju/’hoansi still regularly practice persistence hunts any more. Of the

slowly shrinking group of active hunters in Nyae-Nyae today, all prefer to

hunt big meat-animals with their bows and poison arrows. Most of them are

now well into their middle age, but as fit as they may be, persistence hunts

are for younger, “hungrier” men. Back in the 1950s, several Ju/’hoansi in

Nyae-Nyae were still masters of persistence hunts, an art that may well be

as old as our species and possibly much older still. It is also an art that

reminds us how much of the work done by our evolutionary ancestors in the

course of meeting their basic energy needs was cerebral, and involved

gathering, filtering, processing, hypothesizing, and debating sensory

information from the world around them.

The evolutionary arms race in the Kalahari has made most of the

important meat-animals quick and agile, and most of the predators that hunt

them sharp-clawed, a little bit quicker, and a lot stronger. But, with a few

exceptions, neither predator nor prey has much stamina. Unable to sweat, it

takes time for animals like lions or wildebeest to reduce the body heat they

generate when trying to make or escape a kill. When a kudu is charged by a

lion or a springbok by a cheetah, the outcome of a hunt is always

determined in a few energy-sapping seconds. If the escape is successful,

both predator and prey will need some time to rest, cool down, and regather

their wits.

Humans never win in a short sprint when they are charged by a lion or

pursue an antelope. But they are hairless and can sweat. As bipeds with

long, easy strides, they are capable of running far and of keeping a steady,

unrelenting pace for hours if necessary.

A persistence hunt is simple in theory. It involves finding a suitable

animal, ideally one weighed down with heavy horns, and then pursuing it

relentlessly, offering it no opportunity to rest, rehydrate, or cool down, until

eventually the dehydrated, overheating, and delirious animal freezes, a

ghost of itself, and invites the hunter to walk up casually and take its life.

In the 1950s, the Ju/’hoansi only hunted this way alongside a set of

shallow depressions, in which the summer rains gathered and which were

bordered by a sticky mucous of gray soft mud that when dry sets hard like a

brittle cement. For eland, the largest of Africa’s antelope, and the

Ju/’hoansi’s favorite meat, the mud is a problem. When drinking at the pans

the mud gathers in the bored cleft between their hooves, and later, when

drying, expands and splays the hoof apart, making it painful for them to

run. Scouting in the dry sand beyond the pan, it is easy enough to recognize

the distinctive prints of eland with mud-gunked hooves.

Persistence hunts were only ever initiated on the hottest days, when

temperatures soared close to or beyond 105 degrees Fahrenheit, and all

sensible meat-animals thought only of finding shade and doing as little as

possible. Then the hunters would take the eland’s spoor, following it at a

gentle rhythmic trot. Unlike hunting with a bow, which requires a careful,

silent stalk, persistence hunters want the eland to panic and to tear off into

the bush as fast as it can. Then, perhaps after running a couple of miles, the

eland, confident that it has escaped any imminent threat, seeks out shade in

which to catch its breath and ride out the pain in its hooves. But before long

the hunters, following steadily in its tracks, come back into view again and

hound it into another sprint. Within three or four hours, and after twenty or

twenty-five miles, the eland, tortured by its glued-up toes, crippled by

cramps, and delirious with exhaustion, meekly offers itself up to the

hunters, who by then are able to approach it unhidden and suffocate it by

lying on its neck while holding its nostrils and mouth shut with their hands.

This method of hunting was not unique to southern Africa. Paiute and

Navajo Native Americans used to run down pronghorn antelope in this way;

Tarahumara hunters in Mexico ran down deer that, once exhausted, they

suffocated with their bare hands; and some Australian Aboriginals

occasionally made use of this technique when hunting kangaroo.

Because this method of hunting leaves no obvious material trace, there is

no hard archaeological evidence that our evolutionary ancestors hunted in

this way. But if technologically limited Homo erectus and others hunted

plains game in addition to scavenging, it’s hard to think of them doing it in

any other way. And if they had the smarts to imagine a hand-ax buried in a

lump of nondescript rock, there is no reason to believe that they should not

also have been able to conjure the form of a familiar living animal from its

tracks. For some anthropologists, most notably Louis Liebenberg, an

accomplished tracker himself, the tracks in the archaeological and fossil

records are clear. He is of the view that Homo erectus must have hunted in

this way and that this form of hunting must also have played a part in

making us bipedal—in molding our bodies for long-distance running, in

developing the ability to cool our bodies with sweat, and adapting our

minds to the challenges of inferring meaning from this, the most ancient

form of writing.

He is almost certainly right. The skills required to infer complex meaning

from sandy tracks are not only indicative of the kind of purposefulness we

associate now mainly with humans, but also the cognitive traits necessary to

use grammar and syntax in a more sophisticated manner than Koko did. In

other words, hunting was almost certainly among the selective pressures

that encouraged the development of our ancestors’ ability to develop

complex language. Equally important, hunting in this way may have played

an important role in shaping their sociality and social intelligence as well as

building up the perseverance, patience, and sheer determination that still

characterize our approach to work.

Other skills that leave no obvious archaeological traces must also have

played a role in increasing the efficiency of our ancestors in their food

quest. And arguably the most important of all these skills was the one that

not only helped provide the nutrition necessary to feed their big brains but

that also kick-started the most important and far-reaching energy revolution

in human history: mastery of fire.

FIRE’S OTHER GIFTS

For the Ju/’hoansi, fire is the great transformer. It is generated by the gods

through lightning, but can be made by anyone with two dry sticks or a flint

once they know how. It transforms the raw into the cooked, makes cold

bodies warm, tempers wet wood until it is as hard as bone, and can melt

iron. More than that, it transforms darkness into light and dissuades curious

lions, elephants, and hyenas from harassing people while they sleep. And

every dry season wildfires blaze through the Kalahari, scouring the land of

dead grass and inviting the first summer rains to fall, so ushering in a new

year and new life.

Ju/’hoansi shamans also insist that fire provides the energy that transports

them to the shadow world of spirits during healing-dances as they dip and

dive through roaring hot flames and bathe in coals to ignite their n/um, the

healing force that resides deep in their bellies and that, when heated,

assumes control of their bodies.

Were fire capable of transporting these shamans into the ancient past,

they would see in its flames a vision of how by mastering it our ancestors

reduced the amount of time and effort they had to dedicate to the food

quest, and how this in turn helped stimulate the development of language,

culture, stories, music, and art, as well as shifting the parameters for both

natural and sexual selection by making us the only species where brains

might be more sexually beneficial than brawn. Then they would see how, in

providing our ancestors with leisure time, language, and culture, fire also

summoned into existence leisure’s odious opposite: the concept of “work.”

Knocking fruit from a tree with a stick involves less work and is less risky

than climbing up into a tree to pluck fruit from its branches, just as slicing

through a dead mastodon’s hide by concentrating force in the cutting edge

of an obsidian flake requires less effort than gnawing at its carcass with

teeth better suited to mashing soft fruit and grinding vegetables into a

digestible pulp. The habitual use of tools vastly expanded the range of foods

available to our evolutionary ancestors, helping to establish them as

versatile generalists in a world where most other species were specialists

who had evolved to exploit often narrow ecological niches to secure their

basic energy needs. But in terms of energy, no physical tool holds a torch to

the most important tool in all of human evolutionary history: fire.

Around 2 million years ago, Australopithecus could only extract energy

from the world by proxy. Like many other species, they did this by eating

plants that had captured, stored, and repackaged mainly solar energy into

more conveniently edible forms like leaves, fruits, and tubers by means of

photosynthesis. Then around 1.5 million years ago, Homo habilis extended

the energy-by-proxy model by developing a taste for more complex

organisms that had already gone to the trouble of concentrating the nutrients

and energy in plants by converting them into flesh, organs, fat, and bone.

This was our lineage’s first energy revolution, because the additional

nutrition and energy that flesh, fat, and bone provided helped Homo habilis

to grow much bigger brains. It also reduced the extent of their dependency

on less energy-dense gathered foods and so reduced the total hours they

needed to dedicate to the task of finding food. But raw flesh, fat, and bone

was not enough on its own to grow and maintain brains as big and energy-

hungry as Homo sapiens’. To do that they needed to cook their food, and to

cook it, they needed to master fire, a process that kicked off the second, and

arguably the greatest, energy revolution in our history.

It is impossible to know what first persuaded our evolutionary ancestors

to master fire. Maybe they were intoxicated by the smells of burned meat as

they scavenged their way through lands scorched by wildfires, or perhaps

they were hypnotized by the dangerous beauty of the flames. Neither do we

know which of our evolutionary ancestors first mastered fire or when they

did it.

It’s one thing to grab a glowing ember from the path of a wildfire with

the ambition of making a smaller, controlled fire to cook meat on or keep

warm by. But being able to conjure it at will and so access a near-limitless

supply of energy is something altogether more special. And mastery of fire

would not have been possible if, at some point in the distant past, our

ancestors had not begun to fiddle with, manipulate, and intentionally

repurpose objects around them. The discovery of how to make fire must

have happened more than once, and in each event it was almost certainly a

fortunate accident, one that occurred while using or making other tools with

an entirely different goal in mind. Some populations may have discovered

how to make fire when cutting flakes off an iron-rich stone like pyrite that

produces sparks when struck. But a more likely scenario is that our

ancestors discovered the secret of making fire while crafting something that

involved creating friction between pieces of wood.

Conjuring fire from two sticks is a complex process. Beyond requiring

some dexterity, it also requires a lightness of touch and a much more

sophisticated understanding of causality than that needed to knock a fruit

from a tree with a stick or persuade termites from a mound using a twig.

These are traits we associate with modern Homo sapiens, but there is good

reason to think that our evolutionary ancestors made use of fire long before

our species appeared 300,000 years or so ago.

Wonderwerk Cave, which means “Miracle Cave” in Afrikaans, is located on

top of a dolomite hill just north of the small town of Kuruman in South

Africa’s semi-arid Northern Cape. It owes its name to a desert-parched

group of Afrikaner travelers who found a pool of life-saving water in the

cave’s interior some two centuries ago. Geologists prefer to credit this

particular miracle to natural processes, but this does not discourage

members of local apostolic churches from trying to plunder the cave’s

“holy” water.

If Wonderwerk inspires talk of miracles among the godly, it inspires

equal wonder among paleoarchaeologists, who are the latest in a long

procession of humans to find hope and inspiration in its interior.

The cave extends nearly 450 feet into the hill. Its walls and ceiling join

together to form a smooth arc that runs the length of the cave, giving the

appearance of a rock-hewn aircraft hangar. Even on the brightest days

natural light only penetrates 150 or so feet into the interior; beyond this the

darkness is absolute. On entry, the first obvious sign of the cave’s historical

importance is the gallery of finger-painted elands, ostriches, elephants, and

enigmatic geometric patterns that decorate the walls as far as the natural

light reaches. They were painted by the ancestors of southern Africa’s

indigenous foragers 7,000 years ago. But Wonderwerk Cave holds far more

important clues to unraveling the history of work than the finger paintings

of relative newcomers.

A fifteen-foot-tall stalagmite shaped like a clenched fist stands guard at

the cave’s mouth, and also marks the starting point of archaeological

excavations. These stretch into the bowels of the cave where archaeologists

have dug several yards below the level of the cave floor. Each layer of

sediment archaeologists have exposed has revealed another chapter in the

long history of our species from around 2 million years ago.

By far the most important finds in Wonderwerk date to about 1 million

years ago. These include fire-charred bones and plant ash, indicating the

oldest good evidence for systematic fire use by a human population

anywhere. Most likely the bones and ash were left behind by one of the

many Homo erectus—the first humans that walked upright and also had

limbs in recognizably Homo sapiens–like proportions. But the Wonderwerk

ashes don’t reveal how the fire was made or what it was used for.

If Wonderwerk were the only place offering evidence for controlled use

of fire beyond half a million years ago, it could be dismissed as a one-off,

but there are other tantalizing indications of use of fire elsewhere, some

well over a million years old. In the Sibiloi National Park, adjacent to Lake

Turkana in Kenya, archaeologists have found a clear association between

the presence of hominins and what appear to be controlled fires dating from

roughly 1.6 million years ago, but in the absence of other examples it is

hard to say whether this was systematic.

There is, however, plenty of evidence for the systematic use of fire in the

more recent past. Archaeologists have found lots of evidence for the

sustained use of fire by early humans who lived in Qesem Cave in Israel

400,000 years ago. This data is supplemented by the dental remains of the

cave’s hominin inhabitants from around the same period. These suggest that

they all had horrendous coughs as a result of inhaling too much smoke.1

Archaeologists have also found compelling evidence suggesting controlled

fire use at another Israeli site. This excavation on the shores of the paleo-

Lake Hula, in the northern Dead Sea Rift Valley, revealed a series of what

archaeologists think are hearths containing ash from wild barley, olives, and

grapes alongside burned flint fragments. These are speculated to be 790,000

years old.2

But finding definitive proof for the controlled use of fire by our early

ancestors is near impossible. The first problem is that the evidence of the

use of fire is always, somewhat inconveniently, burned, and ashes are easily

dispersed by gusts of wind or a rainstorm. Generally for evidence of fire to

be found, fires would have needed to be made repeatedly in the same spot

to steadily build up a supply of ash large enough to leave a trace that would

distinguish it from that left by a wildfire.

The other problem is that many “cavemen” tended not to live in caves,

the only places where ashes and burned bones stand a good chance of being

preserved beyond a few months. As savannah dwellers, most would have

slept under the stars with little more than a simple shelter to protect them

from the elements, just as many hunter-gatherers still did in the twentieth

century. As we know from communities like the Ju/’hoansi, a good fire is

all you need to keep even the hungriest nocturnal predators at bay. Another

obvious problem—as the former residents of Qesem Cave would tell you—

is that fires in confined spaces risk suffocating you, if the smoke doesn’t

drive you to distraction first.

Besides ancient embers from places like Wonderwerk, by far the most

compelling evidence indicating that some hominins at least mastered fire

perhaps as long as a million years ago is the fact that it marked the

beginning of a period of sustained and rapid brain growth, an idea

championed by the Harvard-based evolutionary archaeologist Richard

Wrangham.

Until 2 million years ago our Australopithecus ancestors’ brains fell well

within the size range of those occupying the skulls of modern-day

chimpanzees and gorillas. They were between 400 and 600 cubic

centimeters in volume. Homo habilis, the first official member of our genus

Homo, appeared around 1.9 million years ago. Their brains, though, were

only a little larger than those of Australopithecus, averaging a little over

600 cm3 in volume. But fossil evidence suggests that they were organized

somewhat differently to Australopithecus, brains and had more highly

developed forms of some of the features we now associate with modern

humans’ neuroplasticity and higher cognitive functions (like unusually large

neocortices).

The oldest fossil skulls of Homo erectus are 1.8 million years old. Their

brains were significantly larger than Homo habilis’s, suggesting that

something that happened around that time catalyzed the rapid growth of

Homo erectus’ brains. Homo erectus’s million-year reign as cleverest

primate, however, was marked by very little in the way of brain growth. But

then, beginning 600,000 years ago, there was another surge in brain growth

that saw the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis, and then a few hundred

thousand years later the emergence of archaic Homo sapiens and

Neanderthals, many of whom had brains larger than most of us do now.

A host of different theories have been proposed to explain the two surges

in brain-size growth, but only one accounts for the outsized energy demands

associated with building and maintaining big brains with big neocortices.

Our brains only constitute 2 percent of our total body weight but they

consume around 20 percent of our energy resources. For chimpanzees,

whose brains are roughly one-third the size of our own, the energy used is

closer to 12 percent and for most other mammals it is between 5 and 10

percent.3

Building and maintaining such big brains on the basis of a foraged raw-

food, vegetarian diet would have been impossible. Even if they were to eat

constantly, every waking minute of every day, gorillas and orangutans

would not be able to meet the outsized energy requirements of running a

brain the same size as ours based on a diet of wild fruits, leaves, and tubers

alone. To do this requires eating more nutritionally dense foods. The

transition from Homo habilis to Homo erectus is marked by good

archaeological evidence for the more frequent consumption of just such a

food source. Based on the scant archaeological evidence for fire use until

half a million years ago, it seems likely that cooking spurred the next big

period of brain growth.

Relative brain sizes of ancestral humans

Meat, flesh, and organs may be a rich store of calories, amino acids, and

other nutrients, but they are also slimy, tough, and hard to chew and digest

when raw. Though now many in the industrialized world display a

preference for lean cuts of meat, this is more an index of the astonishing

productivity of the modern food industry than the base nutritional value of

those cuts. Hunter-gatherers—and indeed most human populations before

the twentieth century—eschewed lean cuts like filets in favor of the fattier,

gnarlier, offalier cuts because these were far more nutritious. And, as any

hunter-gatherer will tell you, trying to swallow a long, stringy, fatty tendon

or extract every last bit of marrow from a buffalo’s shin bone is an awful lot

easier if you cook it first.

Cooking not only makes meat more palatable; it also vastly extends the

range of plant foods that we can eat.4 Many tubers, stalks, leaves, and fruits

that are indigestible—or even poisonous—raw are both nutritious and

flavorful when cooked. Eating uncooked nettles, for example, is a recipe for

pain. Eating boiled nettles is a recipe for a healthy, surprisingly tasty, soup.

Thus in environments like the Kalahari, where most wild herbivores depend

on eating large quantities of a handful of related plant species, the

Ju/’hoansi were able to use fire to make use of over a hundred different

plant species (in addition to eating the meat of pretty much anything that

moved), and by cooking them extract far more energy with far less effort.

If fire helped once mostly vegetarian hominids to access the nutritional

treasures of meat and to grow big brains, then it almost certainly

contributed to shaping other aspects of our modern physiology too.

Primates like chimpanzees and gorillas have much larger long intestines

than humans. They need this additional colonic real estate to squeeze

nutrition from their fibrous, leafy diets. By “predigesting” foods through the

process of cooking, fire made a significant proportion of this digestive

plumbing redundant. Cooking also helped redesign our faces. Eating softer,

cooked foods meant that having big-muscled jaws ceased to be a selective

advantage. So as our ancestors’ brains grew, their jaws shrank.5

Perhaps it is because so many see cooking as hard work that we have paid

so little attention to what may be among the most important of fire’s many

gifts: the gift of free time. For fire was not only the first great energy

revolution in our species’ history, it was also the first great labor-saving

technology.

Because their diet is not particularly nutritious, gorillas have to eat

around 15 percent of their bodyweight in food per day to stay healthy. This

does not leave much time for fighting, sex, or play. This is why large-

primate researchers are forced to spend endless hours sitting around

watching their subjects methodically foraging and eating if they are ever to

witness them doing something more interesting. We know that most of the

larger primates spend between eight and ten hours per day foraging and

eating. This equates to something between a fifty-six- and seventy-hour

workweek. Chewing, digesting, and processing the leaves, pith, stalks, and

roots is also time-consuming and energy-intensive. They spend most of

what’s left of their time sleeping and lazily grooming one another.

Life for our last distinctly simian-looking ancestor, Australopithecus, was

probably not very different.

When confronted by an all-you-can-eat buffet it sometimes feels like we

can match our primate cousins’ appetites. But we can thrive by consuming

only 2 or 3 percent of our bodyweight per day (based on hunter-gatherer

diets). And, if groups like the Ju/’hoansi are anything to go by, then we

know that for much of the year, a group of economically active Homo

sapiens adults living in a relatively hostile environment can typically feed

themselves and an equal number of unproductive dependants on the basis of

between fifteen and seventeen hours’ work per week. This translates into

one to two hours’ work per day, a fraction of the time spent on the food

quest by other large primates and a fraction of the time most of us spend at

work.

If by mastering fire and cooking, Homo erectus secured greater energy

returns for less physical effort, then as their brains grew so did the amount

of time available to them to apply their intelligence and energy to activities

other than finding, consuming, and digesting food.

The archaeological record doesn’t leave us too many clues indicating

what our ancestors did with the free time their cooked food bought them.

We know that as their brains grew they got measurably better at making

tools, and they probably also had much more time for sex. But for the rest

we have to speculate.

In mapping the evolution of Homo sapiens’ intelligence, many researchers

have zeroed in on how activities like hunting cooperatively were likely to

have been instrumental in honing our problem-solving and communication

skills. They almost certainly were, but the emphasis afforded activities like

these may be more a reflection of the cultural importance we now ascribe to

economic activities than the reality of day-to-day life for our evolutionary

ancestors.

How Homo habilis and Homo erectus spent their free time from the food

quest must have also played some role in shaping their evolutionary

journey. This raises the tantalizing prospect that in evolutionary terms we

may well be as much a product of our leisure as our labor.

Boredom is not a uniquely human trait but it manifests in different ways

for different species. This is why some philosophers like Martin Heidegger

insisted that to claim under-stimulated animals are bored is pure

anthropomorphism. To be properly bored, they argue, requires self-

awareness, and most animals are not self-aware.

Dog owners whose pets’ tails wag optimistically at the prospect of a walk

would dispute this. As do the animal behaviorists who work hard to find

ways to alleviate the miseries of captivity experienced by many under-

stimulated zoo animals. Where we obviously differ from numerous other

species is in the extent to which boredom spurs creativity. We play, we

fiddle, we experiment, we talk (even if only to ourselves), we daydream, we

imagine, and, eventually, we get up and find something to do.

Surprisingly little scientific research has been done on boredom, given

how much time many of us spend bored. Historically, boredom has only

proved of sustained interest to those in solitary professions, like

philosophers and writers. Some of Newton’s, Einstein’s, Descartes’s, and

Archimedes’s greatest insights have all been attributed to boredom. As

Nietzsche (who also credited boredom with breathing life into some of his

most influential ideas) put it, “for thinkers and sensitive spirits, boredom is

that disagreeable windless calm of the soul that precedes a happy voyage

and cheerful winds.”

Nietzsche was almost certainly right. The only obvious adaptive

advantage of boredom is its ability to inspire the creativity, curiosity, and

restlessness that motivates us to explore, seek novel experiences, and take

risks. Psychologists also remind us that boredom is a more fertile mother of

invention than necessity, and that it can stimulate very un-Nietzschean pro-

social thoughts as well as a heightened sense of self-awareness, a

perspective that is theologized in Zen Buddhism.6 Beyond this, boredom

drives our species’ purposiveness and makes it possible for us to find

satisfaction, pride, and a sense of achievement in pursuit of hobbies that

serve no immediate purpose other than keeping us busy. If it were not for

boredom, we would live in a world with no train-spotters, no part-time Jedi

Knights, no stamp collectors, no wood whittlers, and very possibly none of

the inventions that have changed the course of history. It is far more likely

to have been boredom rather than an instinct for physics that taught

Australopithecus that cracking rocks together might produce sharp flakes

that could cut. It was also possibly boredom that inspired our ancestors’

interest in fire and their bored fidgeting hands that discovered that rubbing

sticks together might generate enough heat to ignite a small fire.

Boredom’s ability to induce fidgeting, ferreting, and creativity must also

have played a role in persuading our ancestors to make art, an activity that

is simultaneously work and leisure, that is emotionally, intellectually, and

aesthetically functional, but of no practical value to foragers in terms of the

food quest.

Evidence of purely representational art appears quite late in the

archaeological record. The oldest high-quality rock paintings that survive

have been dated to around 35,000 years ago, some 265,000 years after the

first signs of Homo sapiens in the archaeological record. The oldest

obviously representational sculptures, slabs of ochre with neat geometric

patterns engraved into them, have been dated to between 70,000 and 90,000

years ago. But defining art in terms of symbolism alone is to close our eyes

and hearts to half the world. If we include careful, deliberate, aesthetically

charged craftsmanship, then we can push these dates back to long before

Homo sapiens appeared on the scene.

The Kathu Pan hand-ax shows us that not only did some Homo erectus

have an eye for aesthetics, but also that they must have had the energy,

time, and desire to spend on activities that were not directly related to the

food quest. In other words, it shows us that they almost certainly had some

concept of work.

It is also likely that our evolutionary ancestors’ artistic sensibilities

predate their ability to manufacture objects like the Kathu Pan hand-ax and

long predate the first unambiguous evidence of symbolic art. Song, music,

and dance leave no trace other than in the memories of those that

performed, heard, or watched it. Nor does by far the most important

medium of symbolic expression: spoken language.

The most complex entities that any individual Homo erectus, Homo habilis,

Homo heidelbergensis, or archaic Homo sapiens had to deal with were

others of their own species. And with some leisure time at their disposal,

humans that mastered fire must have spent a lot more time in each other’s

company without much of an idea about what to do with the excess energy

their cooked food gave them—a state of affairs that would have placed far

greater emphasis on managing social relations.

Being good at fighting is an important skill for keeping order in complex

social groups. Many primate species keep the peace by establishing and

then enforcing hierarchies with demonstrations of aggression and, when

push comes to shove, physical power. When these hierarchies are contested

—as they often are—life in primate groups gets distinctly edgy and

unpleasant. But quite how important this was for early and then later

hominins would hinge on where they sat on the spectrum between

aggressive hierarchical primates and fiercely egalitarian, hyper-cooperative

hunter-gatherers. As our ancestors gained more free time, making or

keeping peace by humoring, entertaining, persuading, and engaging others

—rather than beating them into submission—will have become an ever

more important skill. To do this would have required emotional

engagement, empathy, and, above all, the ability to communicate.

It is unlikely—but not impossible—that our species’ unique

communication skills would have evolved as they did were it not for our

vocal abilities.

Early attempts to assess the linguistic capabilities of other higher

primates failed mainly because researchers had not yet realized that these

creatures simply did not have the physical apparatus necessary to make the

same range of vocalizations that we can. Assessments of the skull

morphology of various ancient hominins indicate a strong link between our

vocal capabilities and our upright posture, such that it may well be the case

that the morphological changes to our mouths, throats, and larynxes enabled

by eating cooked foods also provided us the hardware with which to talk.

But having versatile vocal cords and speech-optimized larynxes are not

on their own enough to make language. That requires a level of cognitive

processing power well beyond other primates.

Interest in understanding the emergence of language now attracts

researchers from a wide range of disciplines—anthropology, neuroscience,

linguistics, comparative anatomy, archaeology, primatology, psychology,

and more. This is important because no single approach can adequately

account for the emergence of our remarkable linguistic skills. But that

doesn’t stop experts in different disciplines from trying. Hypotheses put

forward include Grammaticalization theory, which suggests the rules of

languages grow incrementally from the use of a few basic verbal concepts

over a long period of time, and Noam Chomsky’s Single Step theory, which

proposes that our ancestors’ ability to use language came about near

instantly after a single evolutionary step completed the circuitry needed to

switch on a cognitive grammar-forming apparatus that we all share.

Most of the competing theories are nevertheless compatible to some

degree with the idea that increased leisure time was one of the selective

pressures that advanced the development of our linguistic capabilities, none

more so than the Gossip and Grooming hypothesis advanced by

primatologist Robin Dunbar. He has proposed that language had its origins

in the affectionate grooming we see among primate groups as they gently

scour each other’s hides for parasites, and suggests that our language skills

evolved as a form of vocal grooming that enabled hominids to touch and

soothe others at a distance and groom more than a single individual at a

time. The gossip part of the thesis comes from the fact that, as complex

social beings, our favorite thing to do is to gossip with others about others.

The idea of language emerging as an extension of grooming behavior is

persuasive. Not only does it recognize that language has a strong emotional

component, it also suggests that females probably played a far more

important role in the development of our language capabilities than males.

“If females formed the core of these earliest human groups and language

evolved to bond these groups,” Dunbar argues, “it naturally follows that the

early human females were the first to speak.”7

Humans are unique in their ability to be passively engaged by words,

images, sounds, and actions. We can get lost in music and transported into

other worlds by doing little more than listening to someone speak, even if

that person is a disembodied voice on the radio or a low-resolution,

electronically generated, two-dimensional facsimile on a screen.

The need to occupy ever more restless minds during free time was an

evolutionary pressure that likely selected in favor of those who could

liberate others from the burden of boredom: the socially able, the articulate,

the imaginative, the musical, and the verbally astute—those who could use

language to tell stories, entertain, charm, calm, amuse, inspire, and seduce.

Seduction is a particularly important part of this equation because natural

selection not only weeds out the unfit, it is also a positive process in which

traits are selected by sexual partners. In many primate social groups, high-

ranking, physically dominant individuals typically monopolize sexual

access to lower ranks.

But when the food quest became less time-consuming, less physically

robust males who nurtured their skills as linguists may well have found

themselves becoming increasingly successful in the competition for sexual

partners, so ensuring that their genes made it through to the next generation.

In other words, when our ancestors outsourced some of their energy

requirements to fire, they took the first steps toward creating a world where

the physically powerful sometimes play second fiddle to the articulate and

charismatic.

Mastery of fire also made it easier for some members of early human

communities to feed those unable to feed themselves and perhaps even

those who provided value in non-material forms, like gifted storytellers and

shamans. Among other species the only widespread non-reciprocal sharing

relationships are those between mothers (and less frequently fathers) and

their offspring before they are weaned. There are of course the eusocial

species like termites where workers support soldiers and reproductives.

There are also species where more productive individuals “share food” with

other, less productive, often dominant individuals, most famously female

lions who “share” their kills with dominant males. But there are no

unambiguous examples in the animal kingdom of animals systematically

and routinely caring for those too old to feed themselves, although instances

of this kind of care have occasionally been recorded among some highly

social species like the matriarchal African wild dogs of the Kalahari.

Systematic, well-organized, non-reciprocal sharing outside of a parental

context, in other words, is a uniquely human trait, one that would not be

possible without fire.

We do not know the extent to which the likes of Homo habilis and Homo

erectus cared for non-productive members of their species—in other words,

the extent to which they were willing to do work on behalf of others. There

is good evidence that Homo heidelbergensis, a likely ancestor of the

Neanderthals who lived around half a million years ago, did.8 But if Homo

habilis or Homo erectus had fire, this means that it was not beyond their

economic abilities to do so. Caring for the elderly would suggest empathy,

sympathy, and a sense of self sufficiently evolved to fear death. The most

obvious evidence for this level of cognitive and emotional awareness is

mortuary rituals like burying the dead.

There is little clear evidence of ritual burial among our distant

evolutionary ancestors until 30,000 years ago, but strangely there is for

another small-brained hominin, Homo naledi, a contemporary of later

Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens. Researchers in southern Africa

found evidence of the intentional, likely ritualized, placing of Homo naledi

corpses in a difficult to access chamber of a vast cave complex between

236,000 and 335,000 years ago.9 If naledi did this, then there is good reason

to assume that more cognitively developed hominids also feared death,

cared for the elderly, and mourned their dead. This in turn means that they

must have had the conceptual apparatus to divide up the world around them

and their experiences of it, and so also had culture and language, even if in

rudimentary form. If so, then they would almost certainly have categorized

some activities as “work” and others as “leisure.” This is important because

work is not only something that we do, it is also an idea represented in our

languages and cultures, and to which we attribute all sorts of different

meanings and values.

When the sewers were working and the rubbish had been collected, the

smells that percolated from the market stalls, cafes, and restaurant kitchens

that made Paris the post–Second World War gastronomic capital of the

world ensured that when most Parisians were not eating they were either

thinking or talking about food. Just like many other intellectuals haunting

the Left Bank of the Seine in those years, fire, food, and cooking feature

often in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who for much of the second half

of the twentieth century was the most admired public intellectual in France.

“Cooking,” Lévi-Strauss explained, “is a language through which society

unconsciously reveals its structure.”

An anthropologist who disliked rubbing shoulders with “natives” in

strange lands, Lévi-Strauss synthesized other anthropologists’ fieldwork to

produce an entirely new way of interpreting culture that he called

“structuralism.”

Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist method was spelled out in a series of weighty

tomes, none more important than his four-volume magnum opus,

Mythologiques. And reflecting the importance of fire and food in his

thinking, three of the four volumes of Mythologiques made explicit

reference to cooking and fire in their titles. The first, The Raw and the

Cooked, was published in 1964, the second, Honey and Ashes, in 1966, and

the third, The Origin of Table Manners, in 1968. For Lévi-Strauss, cooking

was the very essence of what it meant to be human.

For a Parisian, Lévi-Strauss’s writing about cooking is surprisingly

joyless. And as with much of the rest of his work, it was easy for his critics

to argue that the ideas proposed in Mythologiques offered a far greater

insight into the carefully ordered, highly technical, dour but very clever

world inside the head of Claude Lévi-Strauss than the world that lay beyond

it.

As complex as some of Lévi-Strauss’s writing may be, his grand

“structural” theory of culture was based on a very simple premise: that the

individual beliefs, norms, and practices that make up a culture are on their

own meaningless but are meaningful when viewed as part of a set of

relationships.

He took his lead from linguists, who by then had established that there

was no organic relationship between what a word in any given language

referred to and the word itself. The letters “d-o-g” have no organic

relationship with the creatures that many of us share our homes with, which

is why the same creatures are represented by different, ultimately arbitrary

sounds in other languages, like “chien” in French or “

huin

” in the

Ju/’hoansi’s click language. To understand what the sound “dog” meant, the

linguists explained, required putting it in the context of the language as a

whole. Thus the sounds made by the letters d-o-g made sense in the broader

set of words that comprise English, and in which phonemically similar

terms like h-o-g or j-o-g had radically different meanings.

Lévi-Strauss’s exploration of the ever-expanding ethnographic record

persuaded him that just as physical sounds are arbitrary, so are our cultural

norms, symbols, and practices. This is why gestures that may be considered

polite in one culture—such as greeting a stranger with a kiss—may be

considered grossly offensive in another and completely without meaning in

a third. Therefore, he argued, individual cultural practices could only be

made sense of by looking at their relationship with other practices in the

same culture. In this way a bisou on the cheek in France could be

understood to be equivalent to shaking hands in Britain or rubbing noses

among Inuit in the Arctic.

Lévi-Strauss was also of the view that our cultures are a reflection of the

way our minds work. And as far as he was concerned, humans are

hardwired to think in terms of opposites. Good, for example, only makes

sense by reference to its opposite, bad. Left to right, dark to light, raw to

cooked, work to rest, and so on. This persuaded him that for anthropologists

to understand any particular culture they had to identify these oppositions

and map out the intersecting webs of relationships between them.

The oppositions between the raw and the cooked appeared again and

again in the myths and cultural practices of different peoples across the

globe. “All cultures have to manage this struggle between nature and

culture,” he wrote. “Nature (‘raw’) is associated with instinct and the body,

while culture (‘cooked’) is associated with reason and the mind, among

other things.”

What also particularly interested him about this opposition was that it

implied a transition. Where left can never become right, something that is

raw can become cooked.

“Not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture,” he

argued, “but through it and by means of it the human state can be defined

with all its attributes.”

Early in his career, Lévi-Strauss was intrigued by the idea of identifying

the point of transition from pre-human to human, the point we went from

animal to human, from nature to culture. But by the time he came to

develop structuralism this was not what preoccupied him.

Trying to make sense of humankind was like “studying a mollusc,” he

explained, because it is “an amorphous, glutinous jelly that secretes a shell

of perfect mathematical form, just as the chaos of humanity produced

structurally perfect cultural artifacts.” He believed it was the ethnographer’s

job to study the structurally perfect external form while others prodded and

poked around in its slippery interior.

Even if he meant it as a grand metaphor rather than a statement of

historical fact, cooking symbolized perhaps more eloquently than anything

else the emergence of complex culture in our evolutionary history, because

a defining attribute of culture is the ability to purposefully and

imaginatively transform objects from a “raw” natural state into a cooked,

cultural state.

And this, of course, is a defining trait of work. Just as raw food is

“worked” by a combination of human agency and fire into a meal, so a

carpenter transforms trees into furniture; a manufacturer of plastic cutlery

works to mold chemical compounds into plastic knives; a teacher works to

transform students from a state of ignorance to one of enlightenment; and a

marketing executive works to transform accumulated stock into profitable

sales.

Few, if any, anthropologists follow Lévi-Strauss’s structural method now.

Advances in cognitive sciences have shown that our minds—and our

cultures—are far more than a mollusk shell of oppositions and associations.

We also know that not all cultures distinguish between nature and culture in

the way Lévi-Strauss assumed, and that our cultures are far more the

product of what we do with our bodies than the likes of Lévi-Strauss ever

realized. But the idea of understanding cultures as systems still shapes

much modern anthropological inquiry, as does the idea that to make sense

of any individual cultural action, belief, or norm requires understanding

what they are not.

And this is where Lévi-Strauss’s structural model adds another critical

dimension to the history of work, because it suggests that by giving our

ancestors more leisure time, fire simultaneously breathed life into leisure’s

conceptual opposite, work, and set our species off on a journey that would

lead us from foraging in forests to the factory floor.

PART TWO

The Provident Environment

“THE ORIGINAL AFFLUENT SOCIETY”

By the dawn of the third millennium, even though there was good

archaeological evidence to show that anatomically modern Homo sapiens

may have been around for at least 150,000 years, most anthropologists

believed that our ancestors only became “behaviorally modern” much more

recently. They were convinced that up until around 50,000 years ago our

ancient ancestors languished on the wrong side of a critical cognitive

evolutionary threshold and so lacked the ability to muse about the mysteries

of life, praise gods and curse spirits, tell funny stories, paint decent pictures,

reflect on a day’s events before drifting off into dream-filled sleep, sing

love songs, or make clever excuses to get out of a chore. Similarly they

were convinced that until Homo sapiens crossed this threshold our

ancestors were not intellectually nimble enough to creatively apply skills

acquired in one context to other, different contexts with the fluidity that we

do today. In short, they were convinced that our ancestors only very

recently became capable of working with the purposefulness and self-

awareness that we do today.

They believed this because, up to then, the earliest unambiguous

evidence for this kind of cleverness—in the form of skilled rock paintings

and engravings, symbolic sculptures, complex and diverse tool-making

traditions, elegant jewelry, and ritualized burial—was 40,000 years old.

Given that there were no obvious physical changes to Homo sapiens at this

time, they hypothesized that this “great leap forward” occurred when an

invisible genetic switch was thrown, perhaps around 60,000 years ago. As a

result, they argued, human populations across Africa as well as those that

had crossed into Europe and Asia simultaneously became “behaviorally

modern” around this time and, inspired by their new-found abilities,

promptly set off to colonize the rest of the world, leaving signs of their

ingenuity, creativity, and intelligence wherever they went, when they

weren’t too busy wiping out the local megafauna and picking fights with

distantly related humans like Neanderthals.

The broken skulls of Neanderthals and other early humans stored in

museum basements and university archives across the world don’t care

what anyone says about them now. But it is hard to ignore the obvious

problems that arise when adjudicating the cognitive sophistication of a

people based mainly on the kinds of things they made. After all, many

indigenous people the world over were until recently deemed subhuman by

others on the basis of their simple material culture, none more so than

Tasmanian Aboriginals in the eighteenth century, who were such efficient

foragers that they acquired all the food they needed using a set of tools so

basic that they would make a Homo erectus hand-ax look like cutting-edge

technology.

Now a rapidly growing body of data indicates that not only were early

Homo sapiens every bit as self-aware and purposeful as we are now, but

also that Homo sapiens have been around far longer than was ever imagined

before. As new archaeological discoveries in southern Africa and beyond

also show, people were already making all sorts of clever things tens of

thousands of years before the supposed cognitive revolution. And, taken

together with research conducted by anthropologists among geographically

isolated peoples who continued to make a living as foragers in the twentieth

century, this data suggests that for 95 percent of our species’ history, work

did not occupy anything like the hallowed place in people’s lives that it

does now.

For more than a century after Darwin published The Origin of Species,

academic debates about the genetic affinities of ancestral populations

hinged as much on moments of inspiration, imagination, Aristotelian

reasoning, and rhetorical skills honed in the debating chambers of the

Oxford and Cambridge Unions as they did on actual hard evidence. There

was simply no absolute way of establishing the genetic relatedness of

individuals purely on the basis of physical resemblance.

Paleogenetics—the science of distilling deep human history from ancient

genomes—is a science in its infancy. But it is a whale of an infant. Over the

past two decades, as technologies have advanced and scientists have

become more adept at prizing genetic information from ancient bones and

teeth to compare with living populations, so they have generated a flurry of

new insights into and questions about our species’ evolution, expansion,

and interactions over the past half-million or so years.

A human genome can now be sequenced in any one of thousands of

different laboratories in an afternoon and at a price that will give you some

change from $200. And with economy has come scale. Now an army of

algorithms trawl day and night through almost unimaginably large

databases packed with high-resolution data on the DNA of millions of

individuals both living and dead. Most of these algorithms have been

designed to find, compare, and interrogate interesting patterns either within

individual genomes or across sets of genomes for medical and

epidemiological research. But some of them have been designed

specifically to ferret out the mysteries of our evolutionary history, by

untangling the affinities between ancestral DNA recovered from well-

preserved ancient bones and DNA from contemporary human populations.

These have yielded data that has forced us to completely reimagine much of

our species’ deep history.

Now, new evidence-based discoveries come so frequently and are often

so surprising that genetic historians rarely hold on to any single

interpretation of the data because they have learned to expect that at any

moment something new will be revealed that will turn their thinking on its

head.

Some of these discoveries—like the unambiguous evidence showing that

most of us have recent Neanderthal ancestry—ask new questions about our

sense of what it means to be human. Some also demand that we abandon

the well-established visual metaphor of portraying evolutionary history as a

tree, with a discrete trunk, branches, and twigs representing the distribution

of genetic information across generations and between the different

kingdoms, clades, orders, families, genera, and species that make up all

living things. Because when we zoom in tighter on the tree we see that it

better resembles an inland river delta comprised of thousands of

intersecting channels that variously merge with and split from one another.

But among the most intriguing of all the discoveries thus far is that the

neat story of Homo sapiens evolving from a single small distinct lineage of

archaic humans somewhere in Africa and then spreading out to conquer the

world is almost certainly wrong. Instead it now seems likely that several

distinctive Homo sapiens lineages that shared a common ancestor around

half a million years ago evolved in parallel with one another, and appeared

near-simultaneously around 300,000 years ago in North Africa, southern

Africa, and the East African Rift Valley, and that all people today are made

up of a mosaic of genetic features inherited from all of them.1

The new genomic data is illuminating, but the archaeological record for the

first quarter-million years of Homo sapiens’ history is too fragmented and

incomplete to offer us anything more than glimpses into their lives. It shows

that also around 300,000 years ago, early Homo sapiens (and Neanderthals)

across Africa gave up on their hand-axes in concert with one another in

favor of making and using a variety of other tools: smaller, more regularly

shaped stone flakes that were then individually customized for doing

different jobs.

Occasionally stone flakes reveal much more about their makers’ lives

than how technically skilled they were. Among the most revealing stone

tools from this era are some 320,000-year-old obsidian and chert flakes

recovered from Olorgesailie in southern Kenya. These flakes are not

especially interesting or unusual. By then many populations were making

similar tools and knew all too well that obsidian flakes could slice hides and

flesh as if they were made from air, and that chert—a sedimentary rock

composed of tiny quartzite crystals—is the next best thing. What was

special about these flakes was that the unworked obsidian and chert were

sourced from quarries nearly sixty miles2 from where they were chiseled

into a variety of different-sized and -shaped blades and points. This may

signify the existence of complex exchange and social networks spread over

hundreds of square miles. This is what the archaeologists that discovered

the pieces have hypothesized. At the very least it reveals that the makers of

the flakes were sufficiently purposeful and determined to trek very long

distances to specific sites to acquire the best possible materials with which

to make their stone tools.

It is likely that other very old sites like Olorgesailie will be found in

future, adding texture to our understanding of early human life in Africa.

But this optimism is tempered by the knowledge that environmental

conditions in much of the continent are far less suitable for preserving

bones and other organic artifacts than the frost-bitten provinces of Europe

and Asia. For now the most vivid and surprising evidence of how some

early Homo sapiens in Africa spent their time comes from a sequence of

coastal caves in southern Africa.

Blombos Cave overlooks a quiet bay not far from where the Indian and

Atlantic Oceans merge on Africa’s southeast coast. From the cave’s mouth

it is easy to see the southern right whales that sometimes winter in the

waters below.

Today, some 115 feet below the cave’s mouth lies a series of exposed

rock, filled with fry, winkles, mussels, octopus, and crab. For much of the

last 200,000 years, though, these rock pools were dry. Back then, trillions of

metric tons of water were bound into the ice caps, the ocean here was only

visible as a black greasy slick on the distant horizon, and getting to the

beach from the cave involved a long trek over an undulating expanse of

grassy dunes and an ever-shifting web of river estuaries and knee-deep

coastal lagoons.3 But for a 30,000-year period, beginning around 100,000

years ago, sea levels along this coastline were as high as they have been at

any point in the last half-million years and so were not much different to

what they are today.

Back then, southern right whales in the bay may have occasionally

noticed people watching them breach and tail-bob from the cave above, or

glimpsed them gathering mollusks and bivalves in the rock pools by the

beach. For the people, the cave not only granted them a good view of the

bay and easy access to beaches further to the east and west, but also shelter

from the winter storms that barreled into this coast from the south over the

winter months. But perhaps the most appealing thing about this cave was

the excellent surf-and-turf dining opportunities it offered, one of the

highlights of which was the punchy meat and energy-rich blubber of the

whales who ran afoul of the shifting dune beds in the shallower bays, and

perished on nearby beaches.

Fossil remains inside the cave show that its occupants ate much more

than whale steak. In addition to snacking on limpets, winkles, and mussels

alfresco on the beach, they dragged hauls of shellfish up the hill to eat in the

comfort of the cave. To add variety to their diets, they hunted seals,

penguins, tortoises, meaty hyraxes, and less-meaty mole rats.

Archaeologists have also recovered fish bones from the cave. Fish bones

decay quickly so it is hard to draw firm conclusions about how much fish

Blombos’ various residents actually ate, and how much was left by owls,

but the bones are of sufficient variety and quantity to suggest that some of

the cave’s occupants knew a thing or two about catching fish.

Plant remains don’t endure nearly as well as mollusk shells. But this was

a rich landscape. Their food almost certainly included vegetables, tubers,

fungi, and fruits gathered inland and on beach margins.

The cave was also packed with stone points and shards, among them

some finely edged, razor-sharp lance heads to show that they made

sophisticated composite tools that resemble some of those still used by

Ju/’hoansi hunters today. But Blombos Cave is most famous for what its

occupants did when they were not foraging.

A clutch of 75,000-year-old sea-snail beads with holes bored into them,

and which were probably bound together on strings made from sinew,

leather, or plant fibers, shows that people who stayed there were interested

in making jewelry to adorn themselves with. In the upper excavated layers

of the cave, archaeologists also retrieved two chunks of ochre. Each was

engraved with a scruffy, but obviously intentional, diamond pattern. A

fragment of smoothed rock onto which a similar design had been drawn

with an ochre crayon was found as well. These pieces are estimated to have

been made between 73,000 and 77,000 years ago. And while none of these

items are particularly impressive artistically, and were clearly made by

much less practiced hands than those that made the Kathu Pan hand-ax,

they are now described by many as the oldest pieces of representational art

yet discovered.

The oldest finds were unearthed from the deepest layers in the cave.

These are around 100,000 years old. They comprise two pigment-making

“tool kits” of abalone-shell paint-bowls containing a mix of powdered

ochre, charcoal, and other binding agents; matching grindstones to pound

them into powder; and bone stirrers to mix them into a paste. The ochre and

charcoal may have been used as a glue or, more likely, mixed with fat to

produce a decorative all-in-one sunscreen and insect repellent. Arranged as

if they had been put to one side by someone midway through mixing a

paste, these abandoned tool kits hint at sophisticated lives suddenly and

mysteriously interrupted.

There are several other sites in southern Africa that, like Blombos, are so

rich in similar artifacts that many of the archaeologists have been persuaded

to abandon their customary caution when it comes to imagining complete

and complex lives on the basis of a few material scraps. Further north and a

little way inland from Blombos, for instance, there is Sibudu Cave.

Between 77,000 and 70,000 years ago, its ancient residents busily made

pretty ornaments from seashells, and slept on mattresses of sedge and other

aromatic herbs. There is also evidence to suggest that they took care to

work and decorate leather using awls and needles carved from bone, and

that one of the reasons they could afford to spend time on such activities

was that they had cracked the principles of archery some 60,000 years

before any Homo sapiens population in Europe or Asia did.4

Reconstruction of a 70,000 to 75,000-year-old Nassarius shell necklace recovered from Blombos

Cave in South Africa

There is also some tantalizing evidence that indicates this kind of

sophistication was not confined to southern Africa. At a site near the

Semliki River in the Congo, an area not well suited to preserving ancient

artifacts and where political instability has made long-term exploration near

impossible, archaeologists retrieved a set of 90,000-year-old bone harpoon

heads.5 These were carefully notched along one edge with sequences of

precisely sized barbs, making them perfect for spearing the fat, nutritious

catfish whose bones were found alongside the harpoon-heads. Further to the

north, in several sites across North Africa,6 there is also good evidence that,

like the residents of Blombos, people there also routinely made jewelry

from the shells of Nassarius mud snails.

Genomic data suggests that through much of their history ancient African

forager populations were characterized by a surprising level of demographic

stability. This in turn implies that they lived very sustainably. Indeed, it

suggests that if the measure of a civilization’s success is its endurance over

time, then the direct ancestors of southern Africa’s Khoisan are the most

successful civilization in human history—by a considerable margin.

Genetic diversity in Africa as a whole is much higher than anywhere else in

the world, and the genetic diversity of the now tiny 100,000-strong

population of Khoisan is higher than that of any other regionally established

population anywhere in the world. Some of this diversity can be accounted

for by a brief injection of genes from adventurous migrants from East

Africa around 2,000 years ago, but much of it can also be accounted for by

the relative infrequency of famines and other catastrophes that occasionally

wiped out foraging populations that expanded into Europe and beyond over

the course of the last 60,000 years.

The new finds in southern Africa are compelling, but it is hard to infer

much detail from them about how hard these foragers worked or indeed

what they thought about work. But they offer enough to show that in terms

of their economic practices, material culture, and social organization, they

had a great deal in common with the members of the small-scale foraging

populations who largely through isolation had continued to hunt and gather

well into the twentieth century.

In October 1963, Richard Borshay Lee, a doctoral student enrolled in the

anthropology program at the University of California, set up a makeshift

camp near a waterhole in the remote desert in northeast Botswana. He was

there to spend time among one of the last of the world’s few largely isolated

hunting and gathering societies, the northern Ju/’hoansi, or as he referred to

them at the time, the “!Kung Bushmen.” They formed part of the same

broad language community that included the southern Ju/’hoansi in places

like Skoonheid. Crucially though, in the 1960s these Ju/’hoansi were still

free to forage in their traditional lands among the lions, hyenas, porcupines,

aardvarks, and myriad other animals that their ancestors had lived among

for possibly 300 millennia.

Like many other anthropology students at the time, Lee was frustrated by

the fact that the fragmented archaeological record offered no real sense of

how even our recent hunting and gathering ancestors had actually lived. As

far as he was concerned, broken arrowheads, long-abandoned hearths, and

the crumbling remains of gnawed animal bones, which were the

paleoanthropologist’s stock-in-trade, raised many more questions than they

answered. How large, for example, were hunter-gatherer group sizes? he

wondered. How were they organized? Did they differ markedly from one

ecosystem to another? And was life really as tough for them as everyone

imagined?

Lee speculated that studying the handful of societies that continued to

hunt and gather into the twentieth century might help anthropologists and

archaeologists alike shed light on a way of life that was “until 10,000 years

ago a human universal.”7 As novel as Lee’s approach was, the most

surprising thing about it was that no one else had thought of doing it before.

It had been widely believed for some decades that people like the BaMbuti

Pygmies or the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen were living fossils who, by dint of

geography, circumstance, and just plain bad luck, had been left languishing

in the Stone Age when the rest of humankind embarked on its epic journey

to scientific enlightenment.

Above all, Lee wanted to understand how well hunter-gatherers coped

with scarcity and took the view that the best way to do this was to document

how much time they spent procuring what he expected would be their

meager rations. The scientific consensus at the time was that hunter-

gatherers lived permanently on the edge of starvation, were plagued by

constant hunger, and counted themselves lucky to survive into their thirties.

Outside of academia, most people’s views on hunter-gatherers were shaped

by a patchwork of grisly tales about elderly “Eskimos” unable to pull their

weight being abandoned on ice floes, and of mothers in remote tribes

throwing newborn infants to the hyenas because they knew they could not

feed them.

Lee chose to go to the northern Kalahari instead of Australia or South

America—both of which had well-established hunter-gatherer populations

—because he believed that the bands of Ju/’hoansi Bushmen were likely to

offer the best insights into Stone Age life anywhere. He understood that

while Bushmen elsewhere in southern Africa had been partially

“acculturated,” the northern Ju/’hoansi living beyond the white cattle

ranches had remained largely isolated from agricultural societies because of

the raw hostility of the Kalahari environment, which, incidentally, he also

suspected resembled the “actual floral and faunal environment occupied by

early man.”8

Lee’s desire to experience hunter-gatherer life was not shaped solely by

academic curiosity. Like many others whose earliest childhood memories

were forged during the Second World War, Lee struggled to buy

wholeheartedly into the narrative of progress that had shaped his parents’

and grandparents’ attitudes to life, work, and well-being. He wondered

whether a better understanding of how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived

might offer some insights into the fundamental nature of our species

“stripped of the accretions and complications brought about by agriculture,

urbanization, advanced technology, and national and class conflict.

“It is still an open question,” wrote Lee, “whether man will be able to

survive the exceedingly complex and unstable ecological conditions he has

created for himself” and whether “the efflorescence of technology” that

followed the agricultural revolution would lead us to Utopia or “to

extinction.”9

While settling into the rhythms of Kalahari life, Lee impressed his hosts

with how quickly he came to grips with their complex click language. They

also appreciated his generosity and easy-going manner, even if their near-

constant demands on him for gifts of food and tobacco began to exhaust

him. And so in addition to politely answering the hundreds of often tedious

questions that anthropologists like to ask their hosts, the Ju/’hoansi put up

with him shadowing them as they went about their daily chores while he

checked his watch and weighed every morsel of food they got their hands

on.

Eighteen months after arriving in the Kalahari, Lee gathered up his

notebooks, packed up his camp, and returned to the United States. Once he

returned home he presented the results of his research at the “Man the

Hunter” conference, which he convened in April 1966 with his long-term

research partner, Irven DeVore, at the University of Chicago. Word had got

out that some surprising new insights would be shared at this conference,

with the result that a few anthropological grandees, including the great

Claude Lévi-Strauss, crossed the Atlantic to attend.

Lee’s revelations set the tone for what would become one of the most

talked-about conferences in the history of modern anthropology. In a now

famous presentation, Lee explained how the Ju/’hoansi had persuaded him

that, contrary to received wisdom, “life in a state of nature is not necessarily

nasty, brutish and short” as was widely believed until then.10

Lee told his audience that despite the fact that he conducted his research

during a drought so severe that most of rural Botswana’s farming

population only survived courtesy of emergency food-aid drops, the

Ju/’hoansi needed no external assistance and sustained themselves easily on

wild foods and hunting. He said that each individual in the band he

followed consumed an average 2,140 calories per day, a figure close to 10

percent higher than the recommended daily intake for people of their

stature. What was most remarkable was that the Ju/’hoansi were able to

acquire all the food they needed on the basis of “a modest effort”—so

modest, in fact, that they had far more “free time” than people in full-time

employment in the industrialized world. Noting that children and the elderly

were supported by others, he calculated that economically active adults

spent an average of just over seventeen hours per week on the food quest, in

addition to roughly an additional twenty hours per week on other chores

like preparing food, gathering firewood, erecting shelters, and making or

fixing tools. This was less than half the time employed Americans spent at

work, getting to work, and on domestic chores.

The data Lee presented wasn’t a surprise to everyone at the conference.

In the audience were several others who had spent the last few years living

and working among groups of foragers elsewhere in Africa, in the Arctic,

Australia, and Southeast Asia. While they hadn’t conducted detailed

nutritional surveys, they noted that, like the Ju/’hoansi, people in these

societies were also remarkably relaxed about the food quest, typically met

their nutritional requirements with great ease, and spent most of their time

at leisure.

When Richard Lee convened the “Man the Hunter” conference, many other

social anthropologists were struggling to reconcile the often bewildering

economic behaviors of “tribal” peoples with the two dominant competing

economic ideologies of the time: the market capitalism embraced in the

West and the state-led communism embraced by the Soviet Union and

China. By then economics had emerged as one of the main specialisms in

social anthropology, and resolving this problem had split economic

anthropologists into two warring tribes, the “formalists” and the

“substantivists.”

The formalists took the view that economics was a hard science and

based on a series of universal rules that shaped all peoples’ economic

behaviors. They argued that “primitive” economies, like those of the

Ju/’hoansi and various Native American peoples, were best understood as

unsophisticated versions of modern capitalist economies, because they were

shaped by the same basic desires, needs, and behaviors. Culture, they

acknowledged, played an important role in determining what people in

different societies considered valuable. This was why, for instance, a host of

pre-colonial eastern and southern African civilizations measured wealth and

status in terms of the number, size, color, horn shape, and temperament of

their cattle, and northwest-coast Native American civilizations like the

Kwakwaka’wakw and Coast Salish did so in terms of their ability to lavish

gifts of hides, canoes, woven cedar blankets, slaves, and beautifully carved

bentwood boxes on others. But the formalists insisted that deep down all

people were economically “rational” and that, even if people in different

cultures valued different things, scarcity and competition were universal—

everyone was self-interested in their pursuit of value and everyone

developed economic systems specifically to distribute and allocate scarce

resources.

The substantivists, by contrast, drew inspiration from some of the more

radical and original voices in twentieth-century economics. The loudest

voice among this chorus of rebels was that of the Hungarian economist Karl

Polanyi, who insisted that the only thing universal about market capitalism

was the hubris of its most enthusiastic advocates. He argued that market

capitalism was a cultural phenomenon that emerged as the modern nation

state replaced more granular, diverse, socially grounded economic systems

based mainly on kinship, sharing, and reciprocal gift-exchange. The

substantivists insisted that the economic rationality the formalists believed

was part of human nature was a cultural by-product of market capitalism,

and that we should be far more open-minded when it came to making sense

of how other people apportioned value, worked, or exchanged things with

one another.

One of the attendees of the “Man the Hunter” conference, Marshall

Sahlins, was steeped in the intricacies of this particular debate. He was also

plugged into the broader social and economic questions booming post-war

America was asking of itself at the time. Like Claude Lévi-Strauss,

Marshall Sahlins had done some fieldwork but was more at ease wrestling

with theory than doing battle with blowflies and dysentery in some distant

land. With a reputation for being as immodest as he was gifted,11 he was

able to see the bigger picture a little more vividly than some of his

sunburned colleagues, and declared that to his mind, foragers like the

Ju/’hoansi were “the original affluent society.”

Sahlins was not surprised by the revelation that hunter-gatherers like the

Ju/’hoansi did not endure a life of material deprivation and endless struggle.

He’d spent several years previously focused on questions about the

evolution and emergence of complex societies from simple ones. While Lee

and others were plucking scorpions from their boots in deserts and jungles,

he’d been ferreting through anthropological texts, colonial reports, and

other documents that described encounters between Europeans and hunter-

gatherers. From these he had concluded that at the very least the

stereotypical image of hunter-gatherers enduring life as a constant struggle

against scarcity was far too simplistic. What interested Sahlins the most was

not how much more leisure time hunter-gatherers enjoyed compared to

stressed-out workers in agriculture or industry, but the “modesty of their

material requirements.” Hunter-gatherers, he concluded, had so much more

free time than others mainly because they were not ridden with a whole host

of nagging desires beyond meeting their immediate material needs.

“Wants may be easily satisfied,” Sahlins noted, “either by producing

much or desiring little.”12 Hunter-gatherers, he argued, achieved this by

desiring little and so, in their own way, were more affluent than a Wall

Street banker who, despite owning more properties, boats, cars, and

watches than they know what to do with, constantly strives to acquire even

more.

Sahlins concluded that in many hunter-gatherer societies, and potentially

for most of human history, scarcity was not the organizing feature of human

economic life and hence that “the fundamental economic problem,” at least

as it was described by classical economics, was not the eternal struggle of

our species.

GHOSTS IN THE FOREST

To the thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Conrad, the Congo rainforest was a

cauldron of nightmares. In 1895, slumped on a deckchair beneath the

smokestack of a rickety fifteen-ton steamer, the Roi des Belges, as it

shuttled between ivory- and rubber-trading stations on the banks of the

Congo River, the author of Heart of Darkness imagined this jungle to

incubate “forgotten and brutal instincts” in everyone it drew to “its pitiless

breast.” And, to him, nothing evoked this more than the heady “throb of

drums” and the “weird incantations” that drifted through the humid night air

from the villages concealed beyond the tree line, and which “beguiled the

soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations.”

Conrad’s haunting description of Africa’s greatest forest was textured by

the repeated bouts of malaria and dysentery he suffered, which left him

delirious and hallucinating over the course of his six-month adventure in the

eastern Congo. But more than anything, it was a reflection of his bearing

direct witness to what he later described as “the vilest scramble for loot that

ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical

exploration,” as the Belgian King Leopold’s Force Publique paid for the

rubber, ivory, and gold they demanded from Congolese villagers in the

currency of fear, by chopping off the hands of those who failed to meet their

quotas and taking the heads of anyone who argued.

The same “weird incantations” that were the soundtrack to Conrad’s

ghoulish nightmares persuaded the British anthropologist Colin Turnbull,

then aged twenty-nine, to visit the Ituri Forest in northern Congo six

decades later, in 1953. An aficionado of choral music, Turnbull was

intrigued by recordings he heard of the complex, cascading, poly-vocal

harmonies in the songs of the local BaMbuti Pygmies. He wanted to hear

them performed live.

Between 1953 and 1958, Turnbull made three long trips to the Ituri. But

where Joseph Conrad found only “vengeful darkness” in the forest’s

ceaseless “cascade of sounds,” Turnbull was enchanted by a “lusty chorus

of praise” that celebrated a “wonderful world.” He described how for the

BaMbuti there was nothing dark, depressing, or forbidding about this forest;

how they insisted the forest was a “mother and a father” to them; how it

was generous with “food, water, clothing, warmth and affection”; and how

it also occasionally indulged them, its “children,” with sweet treats like

honey.

“They were a people who had found in the forest something that made

their life more than just worth living,” explained Turnbull, “something that

made it, with all its hardships and problems and tragedies, a wonderful

thing full of joy and happiness and free of care.”1

On his return, he produced the mandatory academic and technical pieces.

But his most important work, The Forest People: A Study of the People of

the Congo, was anything but the studious tome the subtitle suggested. His

lyrical description of BaMbuti life lifted the gloomy veil that Conrad had

draped over the forest, struck a chord with the American and British reading

public, and was, for a while, a runaway bestseller. Its success propelled

Turnbull briefly into the world of glossy magazine profiles and daytime

television chat shows, but it did not win him the adulation of many fellow

anthropologists. Some resented his commercial success and declared him a

crass populist. They whispered among themselves that Turnbull was a

romantic whose work told us more about his inflamed passions than it did

about the BaMbuti’s forest world. Others commended him for being a

sensitive and empathetic chronicler of BaMbuti life, but they were not

persuaded that his work was of tremendous academic merit. This didn’t

bother Turnbull particularly. He didn’t care a great deal more about his

colleagues’ criticism than he did about some of his neighbors’ gossip when

he settled into a new home, as part of an openly gay, interracial couple, in

one of the most conservative small towns in Virginia.

Turnbull’s descriptions of BaMbuti life evoked something of the deep

logic that shaped how foragers thought about scarcity and about work. First,

they revealed how the “sharing” economies characteristic of foraging

societies were an organic extension of their relationship with nurturing

environments. Just as their environments shared food with them, so they

shared food and objects with one another. Second, they revealed that even if

they had few needs that were easily met, forager economies were

underwritten by the confidence they had in the providence of their

environments.

The BaMbuti were not the only twentieth-century foragers who saw

generous and affectionate parents lurking among the shadows of their

forest. Hundreds of miles to the west in Cameroon, other Pygmy peoples

like the Baka and Biaka did so too, as did forest-dwelling foragers like the

Nayaka of Kerala Province in India and the Batek of central Malaysia.

Hunter-gatherers living in more open, less womb-like environments than

tropical forests did not always describe themselves as the “children” of

nurturing landscapes that loved them, fed them, and protected them. But in

their environments they saw what they imagined to be the hands of spirits,

gods, and other metaphysical entities sharing food and other useful things

with them. Many of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples, for instance, still insist

that sacred rivers, hills, forests, and billabongs are populated by primal

spirits who “sang” the land into existence during the “Dream Time,” the

Creation. Northern nomadic peoples, among them the many Inuit societies,

some of whom continue to carve out a living hunting on the rapidly melting

fringes of the Arctic, believed that the moose, reindeer, walrus, seals, and

other creatures they depended on not only had souls, but also selflessly

offered their flesh and organs to humans as food and their skins and furs to

keep them warm.

By hunter-gatherer standards, Kalahari foragers had an usually profane

view of their environment, one that mirrored the mixed feelings they had

about their gods, whom they did not think of as particularly affectionate,

generous, or even interested in human affairs. But, even so, the Ju/’hoansi

maintained sufficient confidence in the providence of their environment

never to store food or gather more than was necessary to meet their

immediate needs on any particular day.

Almost all well-documented small-scale hunter-gatherer societies living

in temperate and tropical climates were similarly uninterested in

accumulating surpluses and storing food. As a result, when one or another

species of wild fruit or vegetable came into season they never harvested

more than they could eat in a single day, and were happy enough to leave

whatever they didn’t need in the short term to rot on the vine.

This behavior perplexed farming peoples and later colonial and

government officials as well as development workers who came into regular

contact with hunter-gatherers. To them, growing and storing food was

something that set humans apart from other animals. Why, they wondered,

if there was a temporary surplus, wouldn’t hunter-gatherers capitalize on the

opportunity and work a little bit harder now to make their future more

secure?

These questions would finally be answered in the early 1980s by an

anthropologist who had spent the preceding two decades living and working

among another group of twentieth-century hunter-gatherers, the Hadzabe,

who lived near Lake Eyasi on the Serengeti Plateau in East Africa’s Rift

Valley.

Some Hadzabe elders insist that their most ancient ancestors descended to

earth from a heavenly realm in the sky. But they are not certain whether

they made landfall as a result of sliding down the neck of a particularly tall

giraffe or by scrambling down the meaty boughs of a giant baobab tree.

They don’t care a great deal one way or another, and archaeologists and

anthropologists are similarly uncertain as to the origins of this ancient

population of East African foragers. Genomic analyses indicate that they

are regional outliers and form part of a continuous ancient lineage of

hunter-gatherers going back tens of thousands of years. They are also

linguistic outliers in a region where most people speak the languages

associated with the first farming populations that expanded into and beyond

East Africa around 3,000 years ago. Theirs is a phonemically complex

language that includes some of the click consonants that are otherwise

unique to Khoisan languages, and that suggests a direct but very ancient

linguistic connection between them and southern Africa’s indigenous

people. The Hadzabe’s savannah environment is also somewhat less spartan

than the northern Kalahari and water more plentiful. They nevertheless

traditionally organize themselves in similar-sized bands and, like the

Ju/’hoansi, move between seasonal camps.

In contrast to southern Africa’s foragers like the Ju/’hoansi, the Hadzabe

still retain access to enough land to stick a collective finger up at

government officials who want them to abandon foraging and assimilate

into Tanzania’s mainstream subsistence and market-farming economy. As a

result, many today still depend primarily on hunting and gathering, and

Lake Eyasi has become a magnet for scientists curious to find out more

about the relationship between nutrition, work, and energy in our

evolutionary history.

In the summer of 1957, James Woodburn scrambled up the Serengeti

Plateau to reach the shores of Lake Eyasi, where he became the first social

anthropologist to develop a long-term relationship with the Hadzabe. In the

1960s, he was also was one of the most influential among the cohort of

young anthropologists who spearheaded the resurgence in hunter-gatherer

studies. And just like Richard Lee, he was struck by how little effort it took

for the bow-hunting Hadzabe to feed themselves. In the early 1960s, he

described the Hadzabe as irrepressible small-stakes gamblers who were far

more preoccupied with winning and losing arrows from one another in

games of chance than with wondering about where their next meal would

come from. He also noted that, like the Ju/’hoansi, they met nutritional

needs easily, “without much effort, much forethought, much equipment or

much organization.”2

Up until his retirement in the early 2000s, Woodburn spent nearly half a

century commuting between Lake Eyasi and the London School of

Economics, where he taught social anthropology. One of the many things

that intrigued him about the Hadzabe was not just how little time they spent

on the food quest, but the fact that, again like the Ju/’hoansi, they were

never inclined to harvest more than they needed to eat that day and never

bothered storing food. And the more time he spent there the more

convinced he became that this kind of short-term thinking was the key to

understanding how societies like theirs were so egalitarian, stable, and

enduring.

“People obtain a direct and immediate return from their labor,” he

explained. “They go out hunting or gathering and eat the food obtained the

same day or casually over the days that follow. Food is neither elaborately

processed nor stored. They use relatively simple, portable, utilitarian, easily

acquired, replaceable tools and weapons made with real skill but not

involving a great deal of labor.”3

Woodburn described the Hadzabe as having an “immediate return

economy.”4 He contrasted this with the “delayed return economies” of

industrial and farming societies. In delayed-return economies, he noted that

labor effort is almost always focused primarily on meeting future rewards,

and this was what differentiated groups like the Ju/’hoansi and the BaMbuti

not only from farming and industrialized societies, but also from the large-

scale complex hunter-gatherer societies like those living alongside the

salmon-rich waters of the Pacific Northwest coast of America.

Woodburn was not especially interested in trying to understand how

some societies transformed from having immediate-return economies to

delayed-return ones, or how this transition may have shaped our attitudes to

work. But he was intrigued by the fact that all immediate-return societies

also spurned hierarchy, did not have chiefs, leaders, or institutional

authority figures, and were intolerant of any meaningful material wealth

differentials between individuals. He concluded that foragers’ attitudes to

work were not purely a function of their confidence in the providence of

their environment, but were also sustained by social norms and customs that

ensured food and other material resources were evenly distributed. In other

words, that no one was able to lord it over anyone else. And among them,

one of the most important was “demand sharing.”

For many of the anthropologists living among the remnants of the world’s

foraging cultures in the second half of the twentieth century, the

unselfconscious requests by their hosts for food or gifts, tools, pots, pans,

soaps, and clothing was at first reassuring. It made them feel useful and

welcome as they tried to adjust to life in what at first felt like a very alien

world. But it wasn’t too long before it began to set their teeth on edge as

they witnessed their food supplies disappearing into their hosts’ bellies;

their medical boxes rapidly emptying of pills, plasters, bandages, and

ointments; and as they noticed people wearing clothing that had until a few

days earlier been theirs.

The usually temporary sense that they were somehow being exploited by

their hosts was often amplified by their sense that the flow of material

traffic was mainly in one direction—away from them. It was also often

sharpened by the absence of some of the social niceties they were

accustomed to. Foragers, they learned quickly, did not bracket requests for

food or items from one another with the “pleases,” “thank-yous,” and other

gestures of interpersonal obligation and gratitude that in most other places

are part and parcel of asking, giving, and receiving.

Some struggled to settle into the rhythms of forager life and so never

quite escaped the feeling that they were being taken advantage of. But most

soon gained a more intuitive sense of the logic that governed the flows of

food and other things between people, and relaxed into a world where the

social rules governing giving and receiving were in some respects a polar

opposite to those they had grown up with. It became clear that no one

considered it at all impolite to straightforwardly ask for things from

someone else, but that it was considered extremely rude to turn down

requests for something and that doing so would often result in bitter

accusations of selfishness and could even lead to violence.

They also quickly learned that in foraging societies anyone who had

anything worth sharing was subject to similar demands and the only reason

that they received so many requests was because, even with their meager

research budgets, they were immeasurably wealthier in material terms than

any of their forager hosts were. In other words, in these societies the

obligation to share was open-ended and the amount of stuff that you gave

away was determined by how much stuff you had relative to others. As a

result, in forager societies there were always some particularly productive

people who contributed more than others, and also people who (in the

language of finger-pointing politicians and perplexed economists) are often

referred to as “freeloaders” or “scroungers.”

Nicolas Peterson, an anthropologist who spent time living among Yolngu

Aboriginal foragers in Australia’s Arnhem Land in the 1980s, famously

described their redistributive practices as “demand sharing.”5 The term has

since stuck. It is now used to describe all societies where food and objects

are shared on the basis of requests by the receiver rather than offers made

by the giver. It may only be in hunter-gatherer economies that demand

sharing is the principal means through which objects and materials flow

between people, but the phenomenon of demand sharing is not unique to

their societies. It is an important redistributive mechanism for food and

other objects in specific contexts in all other societies too.

But not all anthropologists at the time agreed that “demand sharing” was

the best term to describe this model for redistributing goods in a

community. Nicholas Blurton-Jones was one of a platoon of social

anthropologists who parachuted in and out of the Kalahari in the 1970s and

’80s to conduct a series of short-term research projects. He suggested that it

might be better to think of demand sharing as “tolerated theft.”6

“Tolerated theft” is what many people think when they scowl at their

paychecks and note how much of it has been appropriated by the taxman.

But even if formal taxation serves a similar redistributive purpose to

demand sharing, “consensus-based command sharing” is probably a better

description of government taxation systems—at least in functioning

democracies. Unlike demand sharing, where the link between giver and

receiver is intimate, national taxation systems are shrouded in institutional

anonymity and backed by the faceless power of the state, even if they draw

their ultimate authority from governments mandated by their citizens to

take their money.

The Ju/’hoansi were horrified when I asked whether demand sharing

could be described as a form of “theft.” As far as they were concerned, theft

involved taking without asking. They also pointed out that back when they

still foraged freely there was simply no point pilfering from one another. If

you wanted something, all you had to do was ask.

We sometimes use the terms “tolerated theft” or “freeloaders” to describe

those who make a living in the parasite economy: the rentiers,

moneylenders, slum landlords, ambulance chasers, and others who are often

caricatured as pantomime villains picking the pockets of ordinary folk. It is

not a new phenomenon. The equation of taxation and theft is as old as

extortion. And while it is hard to avoid the idea that taxation is a form of

theft when revenues are misappropriated to sustain the lavish lifestyles and

egotistical ambitions of kings and kleptocrats, it is a far harder accusation to

make stick in places where people have assumed the collective

responsibility for the common good to ensure a society in which inequality

doesn’t fester.

Market capitalists and socialists are both equally irritated by

“freeloaders”—they just zero in their animosity toward different kinds of

freeloaders. Thus socialists demonize the idle rich, while capitalists tend to

save their scorn for the “idle poor.” That people of all political stripes now

distinguish between the makers and takers, producers and parasites, even if

they define the categories somewhat differently, might suggest that the

conflict between the industrious and idle in our societies is a universal one.

But the fact that among demand-sharing foragers these distinctions were

considered to be relatively unimportant suggests that this particular conflict

is of a far more recent provenance.

Foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi also pose a problem for those who

are convinced that material equality and individual freedom are at odds with

one another and irreconcilable. This is because demand-sharing societies

were simultaneously highly individualistic, where no one was subject to the

coercive authority of anyone else, but at the same time were intensely

egalitarian. By granting individuals the right to spontaneously tax

everybody else, these societies ensured firstly that material wealth always

ended up being spread pretty evenly; secondly that everyone got something

to eat regardless of how productive they were; thirdly that scarce or

valuable objects were circulated widely and were freely available for

anyone to use; and finally that there was no reason for people to waste

energy trying to accumulate more material wealth than anyone else, as

doing so served no practical purpose.

The norms and rules that regulated demand sharing varied from one

hunter-gatherer society to the next. Among foraging Ju/’hoansi, for

instance, demand sharing was moderated by a subtle grammar of

reasonability. No one would expect someone to surrender more than an

equal share of the food they were eating and no one would reasonably

expect to have the shirt off someone’s back if it was the only shirt they had.

They also had a long series of proscriptions and prescriptions regarding

precisely who could ask for what from whom, when, and under what

circumstances. And, because everyone understood these rules, people rarely

made unreasonable requests. As importantly, no one ever resented being

asked to share something even if they may have regretted it.

The Ju/’hoansi had another, far more formal system of gift giving as

well, for objects like jewelry, clothing, or musical instruments, which

operated according to a different set of rules. These bound people into

networks of mutual affection that extended far beyond any individual band

or family group. Significantly, nobody ever held on to any gifts they were

given under this system for too long. The important thing was the act of

giving and part of the joy of the system was that any gifts received would

soon be re-gifted to someone else who in turn would inevitably pass it on.

The net result was that any individual gift—for instance an ostrich-eggshell

necklace—might end up being gifted back to its maker after journeying

through other people’s hands over the course of several years.

Envy and jealousy have a bad reputation. They are, after all, “deadly sins,”

and according to Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae are “impurities

of the heart.” It is not just Catholicism that has it in for these most selfish of

traits. All major religions seem to agree that a special place in hell awaits

those in thrall to the green-eyed monster.

Some languages distinguish between jealousy and envy. In most

European languages envy is used to describe the feelings that arise when

you covet or admire the success, wealth, or good fortune of others, whereas

jealousy is associated with the overwhelmingly negative emotions that

inspire us to protect from others what we already have. In practice, though,

most of us use the terms interchangeably. Unsurprisingly, the two also don’t

translate straightforwardly into many other languages. In Ju/’hoan, for

instance, there is no distinction between the two, and Ju/’hoansi who are

also fluent in English or Afrikaans use the term “jealousy” to refer to both.

It is not hard to see why evolutionary psychologists struggle to reconcile

selfish traits like jealousy with our social ones. It is also not hard to see why

Darwin considered the cooperative behavior of highly social insect species

to be a “special difficulty” that he worried might be potentially “fatal” to his

theory of evolution.7

At an individual level, the evolutionary benefits of our selfish emotions

are obvious. In addition to helping us stay alive when things are scarce, they

energize us in the quest to find sexual partners, so enhancing our chances of

survival and of successfully passing on our individual genes. We see this

play out among other species all the time, and it is fair to assume that

something akin to the emotions stimulated in us by envy and jealousy flood

through the synapses of other animals when beating each other up to

establish social hierarchies, or to gain preferential access to food or sexual

partners.

But Homo sapiens are also a social and highly collaborative species. We

are well adapted to working together. We also all know from bitter

experience that the short-term benefits of self-interest are almost always

outweighed by the longer-term social costs.

Unraveling the mysteries of the conflict between our selfish and social

instincts has not been the sole preserve of evolutionary psychologists. It has

been a near-universal preoccupation of our species ever since any of our

evolutionary ancestors had second thoughts about stealing the food from the

mouth of a smaller sibling. It has found expression in every imaginable

artistic medium, and has generated endless debate and discussion among

theologians and philosophers. This conflict also lies behind the convoluted

theorems, spidery graphs, and sinewy equations that are the stock-in-trade

of the modern economist. For if economics deals principally with the

systems we develop to allocate scarce resources, resources are only ever

scarce because individuals want them for themselves and because to

maintain functioning societies we need to agree to social rules in order to

allocate them fairly. And even if very few contemporary economists make

explicit reference to this very fundamental conflict in their work, it was at

the front of his mind when the Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith set

out to write what would later be recognized as the founding document of

modern economics.

Ever since Adam Smith’s death in 1790, historians, theologians, and

economists have trawled through his writings trying to establish whether he

was a religious man or not. Most agree that if Smith was a man of faith he

was probably at best a lukewarm believer, one who always looked first to

reason rather than dogma to make sense of the world around him. Even so,

it is clear that he was convinced that there were certain mysteries one could

describe and analyze, but not fully explain.

Smith took the view that people were ultimately selfish creatures. He

believed that man “intends only his own gain.” But he also believed that

when people acted in their own self-interest somehow everybody benefited,

as if they were guided in their actions by “an invisible hand” to promote the

interests of society more effectively than “man” could, even if he had

intended to. Smith’s points of reference for this were the market towns of

eighteenth-century Europe, where the traders, manufacturers, and

merchants all worked to make their own personal fortunes, but where

collectively their effort had helped to enrich their towns and communities.

This led Smith to conclude that free enterprise unburdened by regulatory

interference would inadvertently create wealth for all and so ensure “the

same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made,

had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.”

Adam Smith was neither the unapologetic champion for selfishness nor

the apostle for unregulated markets that he is portrayed as by his fiercest

critics and most ardent fans alike. And even if Smith’s hidden hand is still

solemnly invoked by some as gospel, few would defend an inflexible

interpretation of it now. Smith himself would almost certainly be among the

first to acknowledge that the contemporary economic world, with its

convoluted financial derivatives and ever-inflating asset values, is a very

different place from the one populated by the “merchants and mongers” he

had in mind when he mused on the unintended benefits of self-interested

commerce. Indeed, based on his philosophical writings, it is hard to imagine

that he would not, for instance, have supported the Sherman Act, which was

passed unanimously by the U.S. Congress in 1890, a century after Smith’s

death, with the aim of breaking up the railway and oil monopolies that by

then were slowly but surely throttling the life out of American industry.

But ironically, the social role of selfishness and jealousy in foraging

societies suggests that, even if Smith’s hidden hand does not apply

particularly well to late capitalism, his belief that the sum of individual self-

interests can ensure the fairest distribution of the “necessaries of life” was

right, albeit only in small-scale band societies. For in societies like the

Ju/’hoansi’s, envy-fueled demand sharing ensured a far more equitable

“distribution of the necessaries of life” than is the case in any market

economy.

The “fierce egalitarianism” of foragers like the Ju/’hoansi was, in other

words, the organic outcome of interactions between people acting in their

own self-interest in highly individualistic, mobile, small-scale societies with

no rulers, no formal laws, and no formal institutions. And this was because

in small-scale foraging societies self-interest was always policed by its

shadow, jealousy, which, in turn, ensured that everyone got their fair share

and individuals moderated their desires based on a sense of fairness. It also

ensured that those with natural charisma exercised any natural authority

they acquired with great circumspection. For beyond demand sharing, the

most important weapon hunter-gatherers deployed to maintain their fierce

egalitarianism was mockery. Among Ju/’hoansi, and among many other

well-documented hunter-gatherer societies, mockery was dished out

judicially to anyone and everyone. And while it was often cutting and close

to the bone, it was rarely if ever malicious, spiteful, or mean.

In hierarchical societies, mockery is often associated with bullies whose

power exceeds their moral authority. But it is also a tool of the weak, a

means to pillory those in power and hold them to account. In the Ju/’hoan

case this is best reflected in the traditional practice of “insulting the hunter’s

meat.”

Ju/’hoansi foragers considered fat, marrow, meat, and offal to be the

“strongest” of all the foods. Rich in energy, vitamins, proteins, and minerals

that were in short supply in the nuts, tubers, and fruits they gathered, meat

—and its absence—was one of the few things that could cause even the

calmest among them to lose their cool.

It also meant that hunters never expected nor received praise when they

brought meat back to the camp. Instead they expected to be mocked for

their efforts, and for those due a share of the meat to complain that the kill

was scrawny or that there wouldn’t be enough meat to go around no matter

how impressive it was. For his part, the hunter was expected to be almost

apologetic when he presented the carcass and to be unfailingly humble

about his achievements.

The Ju/’hoansi explained that the reason they did this was “jealousy” of

the hunter and concern that someone might gain too much political or social

capital if they were in charge of distributing meat too often.

“When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a

chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or

inferiors,” one particularly eloquent Ju/’hoan man explained to Richard

Lee. “We can’t accept this. . . . So we always speak of his meat as

worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”8

Being insulted, even if only light-heartedly, was not the only price good

hunters had to pay for their hard work and their skill.

Because meat provoked such strong emotions, people took extraordinary

care in distributing it. Where a kill was so big that there was more than

enough meat for everybody to eat as much as they wanted, this was not a

problem. But where there wasn’t enough to go around, who got what cut

and how much was a challenge. While hunters always distributed meat

according to well-established protocols, there was the chance that someone

would be disappointed with their share, which they expressed in the

language of jealousy. As much as meat generated great ecstasies when it

was eaten, hunters often considered the pressures of distributing it to be

more trouble than it was worth.

The Ju/’hoansi had another trick to deal with this. They insisted that the

actual owner of the meat, the individual charged with its distribution, was

not the hunter, but the person who owned the arrow that killed the animal.

More often than not this was the individual hunter. But it was not unusual

for keen hunters to borrow arrows from less enthusiastic hunters precisely

so that they could avoid the burden of having to distribute the meat. This

also meant that the elderly, the short-sighted, the clubfooted, and the lazy

got a chance to be the center of attention once in a while.

Not all well-documented hunting and gathering societies had the same

aversion to hierarchy as the Ju/’hoansi or Hadzabe.

Around 120,000 years ago, some Homo sapiens ventured across the land

bridge between Africa and Asia, now bisected by the Suez Canal, and

established themselves in the Middle East. It is uncertain when these

populations later expanded beyond these warm latitudes into central Europe

and Asia. Genomes prized from ancient bones and teeth indicate that the

wave of modern humans that accounts for much of the genetic makeup of

all major non-African populations today began around 65,000 years ago.

This was during the depths of the last glacial period when global

temperatures were on average nine degrees lower than they are now and

winter ice sheets were rapidly expanding southward, progressively

swallowing up all of Scandinavia, much of Asia, and northern Europe—

including all of Britain and Ireland—with the result that the tundra in some

places extended into the south of France, and much of modern Italy, the

Iberian Peninsula, and the Côte d’Azur better resembled the cold steppes of

eastern Asia than the sun-baked destinations they are today.

The same genomic data also suggests that the vanguard of this wave of

expansion headed first toward the sunrise, eventually making it as far as

Australia sometime between 45,000 and 60,000 years ago. The expansion

westward and northward into an icebound mainland Europe was far slower,

indicating that the Iberian Peninsula was occupied exclusively by

Neanderthals until around 42,000 years ago.9 Just as it was for European

immigrants over the last three centuries, the Americas were very much a

new world for our Homo sapiens ancestors too. By the time the first modern

humans crossed to North America 16,000 years ago, modern humans had

been living and foraging continuously in southern Africa for more than 275

millennia. And just like many later arrivals to the new world, the first

Americans probably arrived by boat.10

Some of the foragers that established themselves in the more temperate

parts of Europe, Asia, and beyond lived, worked, and organized themselves

in broadly similar ways to their African cousins. But not all of them.

Those who settled in frostier climates, where seasons were more starkly

pronounced than they were for African and other foragers in the humid

tropics and subtropics, had to take a different approach to work, at least for

part of the year. Some anthropologists have argued that in some ways they

must have better resembled the “complex” hunter-gatherer societies of

America’s Pacific Northwest coast, like the Kwakwaka’wakw and Coast

Salish and Tsimshian that began to emerge around 4,400 years ago and who

thrived until the late nineteenth century. Their elegant cedar longhouses and

villages were often home to hundreds of individuals, and once dotted the

bays and inlets of the Pacific Coast from Alaska in the north, through

British Columbia and Washington state to Oregon, and their imperious

carved totems guarded the network of waterways that separate the

patchwork of islands from the continental mainland. Beyond the fact that

these societies fed themselves by means of hunting, gathering, and fishing,

and were similarly convinced of the generosity of their environments, they

had very little obviously in common with foragers like the Ju/’hoansi.

Described variously as “complex hunter-gatherers” or “delayed return

hunter-gatherers,” they better resembled some of the most productive

farming societies anywhere. They lived in large permanent settlements,

stored food on a large scale, and were deeply preoccupied with achieving

social rank, which they did through lavish discharges of gifts. They did so

because they lived in places that were astonishingly rich in seasonal food

sources, like the berries, mushrooms, and cattails that flourished from

spring through to the autumn. But it was their taste for seafood and their

skills as fisher-people that made all the difference.

Over the course of any year they dined on black cod, ling cod, dogfish,

flounder, snapper, shellfish, and sole pulled from the sea, as well as trout

and sturgeon from inland rivers and lakes. But it was the teeming schools of

oily fish like herring and eulachon that swam a few miles offshore, and the

five species of salmon that migrated annually up local rivers in their

teeming millions to spawn every year from early summer through to

autumn, that enabled them to abandon the austere approach taken by

foragers like the Ju/’hoansi. These were harvested in such prodigious

quantities that over the course of a few short weeks people could catch and

preserve enough salmon to sustain them through to the following year.

Their fisheries were so seasonally productive that for much of the year

people in these societies spent most of their time and energy developing a

rich artistic tradition, playing politics, holding elaborate ceremonies, and

hosting sumptuous ritual feasts—potlatch ceremonies—in which the hosts

attempted to outdo each other with acts of generosity. Reflecting their

material affluence, these feasts were also often characterized by lavish

displays of wealth and sometimes even the ritual destruction of property,

including the burning of boats and the ceremonial murder of slaves. When

the guests headed home in canoes heavy with gifts of fish oil, exquisite

woven blankets, bentwood boxes, and copper plates, hosts would often

begin to tally up the sometimes considerable debts they incurred to supply

lavish enough gifts to merit the status they sought.

There is no suggestion that the foragers who settled into central and

northern Asia and Europe beginning around 50,000 years ago were

anything near as materially sophisticated as the civilizations that flourished

in the Pacific Northwest between 1500 BC and the late nineteenth century.

Nor is there any question that the environments they lived in were large

permanent communities. But there is a good case to make for critical

elements of the seasonal nature of their work being similar to the Pacific

Northwest coast peoples, and that this represented a significant departure

from the way small-scale foragers in warmer climates organized

themselves.

For a start, populations who settled, for instance, on the frosty steppes of

Asia had to do more work than African foragers just to stay alive. They

could not roam naked or sleep under the stars throughout the year. Enduring

long winters demanded that they make elaborate clothing and sturdy

footwear and gather far more fuel for their fires. They also needed to find or

build shelters robust enough to withstand winter blizzards.

Unsurprisingly, the oldest evidence for the construction of near-

permanent structures and dwellings comes from some of the coldest places

where humans settled during the frostiest years of the last glacial period—

roughly between 29,000 and 14,000 years ago. They take the form of sturdy

domes constructed from hundreds of heavy, dry mammoth bones that have

been discovered at sites across Ukraine, Moravia, the Czech Republic, and

southern Poland. When in use, these domes were likely shrouded with

animal hides to make them windproof and watertight. The largest of them

have diameters in excess of twenty feet, and the sheer effort involved in

their construction suggests that their makers returned to them annually. The

oldest excavated have been dated to 23,000 years ago, but there is good

reason to believe that similar structures were built elsewhere, possibly using

less enduring material than mammoth bone, like wood.

Living in these environments not only demanded that people did more

work but also that they organized their working lives differently, for part of

the year at least. Preparing for winter required significantly more planning

for them than it did for African foragers. Building a mammoth-bone house

and binding skins to it with rawhide is not something that can be done after

the first winter storms have blown through. Nor is hunting and preparing

skins and furs for winter clothing. It was also not always practical or even

possible to find fresh food on the basis of a few hours of spontaneous effort

all year round. For the several months when the landscape was blanketed in

snow and ice, gathering was near impossible and hunting far more

treacherous. But living in a vast deep-freeze for months on end had some

benefits. It meant that food didn’t decay and that meat butchered when the

first heavy frosts fell might still be good to eat months later when the snows

began to thaw. It is hard to make sense of the evidence for their routinely

hunting animals as big and dangerous as mammoths if it wasn’t to create a

surplus.

During the depths of winter, the pace of life and work will have fallen

into step with the more glacial tempo of the season. Besides occasional

hunting, or expeditions to refresh stocks of firewood, many hours would

have been spent huddled close to the fire. Busy minds would entertain and

be distracted by stories, ceremonies, songs, and shamanic journeys. Agile

fingers would have found purpose in developing and mastering new skills.

It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the efflorescence of artwork in Europe

and Asia that archaeologists and anthropologists once assumed indicated

Homo sapiens crossing a crucial cognitive threshold may well have been

the progeny of long winter months. It is also unlikely to be a coincidence

that much of this art, like the 32,000-year-old frescoes of mammoths, wild

horses, cave bears, rhinos, lions, and deer that decorate the walls of Chauvet

Cave in France, was painted in the light of fires illuminating the interior of

weatherproof caves, while most rock in places like Africa and Australia

tended to be on more exposed surfaces.

Evidence of how these populations busied themselves around their fires

in winter takes the form of ancient bone, antler, and mammoth ivory

carvings, and precise, clever jewelry recovered from sites across Europe

and Asia. Among the most famous of these is the world’s oldest

representational sculpture, the Löwenmensch, “Lion Man,” of Hohlenstein-

Stadel. Carved between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago, the mammoth ivory

statue reminds us that not only did foragers see the relationship between

themselves and their animal neighbors as ontologically fluid, but also that

they had developed and mastered a whole range of techniques and tools to

handle the idiosyncrasies of ivory as a medium to work with.

But it is an archaeological site called Sunghir, discovered in the 1950s on

the muddy banks of Klyazma River on the eastern fringes of the Russian

city of Vladimir, that hints at how these populations busied themselves

while waiting for the worst of winter to pass. Included among the stone

tools and other more conventional bits and pieces, archaeologists there

discovered several graves. None were more remarkable than the elaborate

shared grave of two young boys who, sometime between 30,000 and 34,000

years ago, were buried together alongside a straightened mammoth-tusk

lance in clothing decorated with nearly 10,000 laboriously carved

mammoth-tusk beads, as well as pieces including a belt decorated with

teeth plucked from the skulls of over a hundred foxes.

With archaeologists estimating it took up to 10,000 hours of work to

carve these beads alone—roughly equivalent to five years’ full-time effort

for one individual working forty hours a week—some have suggested that

these boys must have enjoyed something resembling noble status, and as a

result that these graves indicate formal inequality among these foragers.11 It

is at best tenuous evidence of institutional hierarchy; after all, some

egalitarian foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi made similarly elaborate

items. But the amount of time and skill involved in manufacturing the

mammoth beads and other items suggests that, like the indigenous people of

the Pacific Northwest, the annual work cycle for them was seasonal and that

in the winter months people often focused their energies on more artistic,

indoor pursuits.

In occasionally storing food and organizing their working year to

accommodate intense seasonal variations, European and Asian foraging

populations took an important step toward adopting a longer-term, more

future-focused relationship with work. In doing so, they also developed a

different relationship with scarcity, one that resembles that which shapes

our economic life now in some important respects. But even if they needed

to plan ahead more than foragers in warmer climates, they remained largely

confident in the at least seasonal providence of their environments.

Somewhat ironically, it was only when the earth began to warm 18,000

years ago that anyone would take the first fateful steps toward food

production, and so lay the foundations of our species’ increasing energy

footprint and obsession with work.

PART THREE

Toiling in the Fields

LEAPING OFF THE EDGE

On the evening of Saturday, October 19, 1957, hikers negotiating the cliffs

near Govett’s Leap in Australia’s Blue Mountains found a pair of

spectacles, a pipe, a compass, and a hat, all neatly arranged on top of a

folded mackintosh raincoat. It was later established that these belonged to

Professor Vere Gordon Childe, the recently retired, world-famous, and

notoriously eccentric archaeologist. He was booked as a guest at the nearby

Carrington Hotel and had been reported missing earlier that day by his

driver when he failed to show up to be ferried to a lunch appointment after a

morning hiking in the mountains. The search party that was dispatched to

investigate the rocks 500 feet below Govett’s Leap returned with the

professor’s lifeless body. After a brief investigation, the local coroner

concluded that the short-sighted professor had lost his footing after

abandoning his spectacles and fallen to his death in a horrible accident.

Twenty-three years later the coroner’s verdict was proved wrong.

A year before Childe checked into the Carrington Hotel, the sixty-four-

year-old had bid farewell to a long and distinguished career, first as

Professor of Archaeology at Edinburgh University and later as the director

of the University of London’s Institute of Archaeology. Several days before

plunging from Govett’s Leap, Childe wrote to Professor William Grimes,

his successor at the institute. Childe requested that Grimes kept the contents

of the letter to himself for at least a decade in order to avoid any scandal.

Grimes did as he was asked. He only revealed Childe’s secret in 1980, when

he submitted the letter to the leading archaeology journal, Antiquity, who

published it in full.1

“Prejudice against suicide is utterly irrational,” Childe wrote to Grimes.

“To end his life deliberately is in fact something that distinguishes Homo

sapiens from other animals even better than ceremonial burial of the dead.

An accident may easily and naturally befall me on a mountain cliff,” he

said, and added that “life ends best when one is happy and strong.”

Having remained resolutely single throughout his life, the prospect of a

lonely retirement on an inadequate pension played some role in Childe’s

decision to end his life. But his letter to William Grimes was, above all, an

unemotional meditation on the meaninglessness of a life without useful

work to do. In it he expressed the view that the elderly were no more than

parasitic rentiers who leeched off the energy and hard work of the young.

He also expressed no sympathy for the elderly who continued to work,

determined to prove that they were still useful. He insisted that they were

obstacles in the path to progress and robbed “younger and more efficient

successors” of the opportunity for promotion.

Born in Sydney in 1892, Childe was the foremost prehistorian of the

interwar years, publishing hundreds of influential papers and twenty books

over the course of his career. But at the age of sixty-four he had reached the

dismal conclusion that he had no “further useful contributions to make” and

that much of his work, in hindsight, had been in vain.

“I actually fear that the balance of evidence is against theories that I have

espoused or even in favor of those against which I am strongly biased,” he

confessed.

Childe’s suicide was a final revolutionary act in a life in which

revolutions played a big role. An avowed Marxist, his youthful hopes that

the carnage of the First World War might accelerate the end of the imperial

era and inspire a global communist-style revolution saw him ostracized by

many in Australia. The same views also resulted in him later being barred

from traveling to the United States, and Britain’s secret service, MI5,

declaring him a “person of interest” and routinely monitoring his written

correspondence. But his most revolutionary work was in the far less

politically incendiary field of prehistory. He was the first to insist that our

ancestors’ transition from hunting and gathering to farming was so

profoundly transformative that it should be thought of as a “revolution”

rather than merely a transformation. This was an idea he nurtured and

expanded throughout his career, but which found its clearest expression in

his most important book, Man Makes Himself, published in 1936.

For most of his career, the principal tools used by archaeologists were

trowels, brushes, buckets, sieves, panama hats, and their imaginations.

Toward the end of his life Childe grew increasingly worried that many of

his best ideas would be proved worthless. By then archaeologists had begun

to work far more with geologists, climatologists, and ecologists, and their

discoveries were revealing that the story of the transition to agriculture was

far more complex than that which he described in Man Makes Himself. It

also now seems increasingly likely that some of what he thought were

consequences of the adoption of agriculture—like people living in

permanent settlements—were actually among its causes. But where Gordon

Childe was absolutely right was in his assessment that in broad historical

terms the transition to agriculture was as transformative as any other that

came before or after it. If anything, he underestimated its significance. For

while previous and later technologically driven transformations—from the

mastering of fire to the development of the internal combustion engine—

also dramatically increased the amount of energy humans were able to

harness and put to work, the agricultural revolution not only enabled the

rapid growth of the human population but also fundamentally transformed

how people engaged with the world around them: how they reckoned their

place in the cosmos and their relationships with the gods, with their land,

with their environments, and with each other.

Gordon Childe was not especially interested in culture, at least not in the

same way that his colleagues in the Social Anthropology Department were.

Also, just like most of his contemporaries, he had no reason to believe that

small-scale hunter-gatherers like Australia’s Aboriginals might have

enjoyed lives of relative leisure or imagined their environments to be

eternally provident. As a result, he never made the connection between the

profound hollowness he felt when he believed he was no longer able to

contribute usefully through his work with the cultural and economic

changes that arose organically out of our embrace of agriculture. Nor did he

imagine that the assumptions underwriting the economic system that left

him anxious about how he would fund his retirement, ideas that claim

idleness is a sin and industry is a virtue, were not part of humankind’s

eternal struggle. They were also by-products of the transition from foraging

to farming.

To the MI5 employees who rifled through archaeological field reports in

search of conspiratorial code in Gordon Childe’s mail, the word

“revolution” conjured images of treasonous plots. But to Childe’s

colleagues at the university, it invoked the gentler image of an established

theory quietly buckling under the weight of its own contradictions and so

clearing the ground for new ways of trying to solve old problems.

Independent centers of plant domestication

When viewed against the backdrop of millions of years of human history,

the transition from foraging to food production was as revolutionary as

anything before or since. It transformed how people lived, what they

thought about the world, how they worked, and rapidly increased the

amount of energy people could capture and put to work. It also happened in

the blink of an evolutionary eye. But none of those who were part of this

revolution thought of themselves as doing anything particularly remarkable.

After all, viewed against the span of a single human lifetime or even against

that of several consecutive generations, the adoption of agriculture was a

gradual transition during which people and a whole series of plants and

animals slowly but inexorably bound their destinies ever closer to one

another, and in doing so changed one another forever.

Over a 5,000-year period beginning a little over ten millennia ago, a

sequence of unrelated populations in at least eleven distinct geographical

locations across Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas began cultivating

some crops and rearing a variety of domesticated animals. Quite why or

how this happened nearly simultaneously remains something of a mystery.

It may have been an astonishing coincidence. It is far more likely, though,

that this at first apparently unlikely convergence was catalyzed by a series

of climatic, environmental, cultural, demographic, and possibly even

evolutionary drivers.2

The oldest clear evidence for plant domestication occurs in the gentle

valleys and rolling hills of the Levant, a region that extends across modern

Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. People there started to experiment

with cultivating wild wheat and legumes like chickpeas from around 12,500

years ago, and from around 11,000 years ago some domesticated strains of

wheat begin to appear in the archaeological record. Besides dogs, whose

association with humans stretches back at least 14,700 years, if not a whole

lot earlier,3 the oldest evidence of systematic animal domestication comes

from the Middle East where there is good evidence of people rearing and

herding goats and sheep from around 10,500 years ago. Another truly

ancient crucible of agriculture was mainland China, where communities in

the floodplains of the Yangtze, Yellow, and Xiliaohe Rivers cultivated

millet and reared pigs from around 11,000 years ago. A few thousand years

later they also began to farm with primitive variants of what are now the

most important regional staples in East Asia, among them soybeans and

rice.4

It took four millennia before agriculture was established as the principal

subsistence strategy for people settled across the Middle East. By then

several important plant and animal species including barley, lentils, peas,

broad beans, chickpeas, wheat, pigs, cattle, goats, and sheep had bound

their destinies to the women and men that reared, nurtured, and consumed

them.5 It was also around this time that agriculture began to take off in

other places, with the result that by 6,000 years ago farming was a well-

established subsistence strategy across many parts of Asia, Arabia, and

North, South, and Central America.

The Natufians are thought to be the first people anywhere to experiment

systematically with farming. But we have no idea what languages they

spoke, or what they called themselves. This population, who are associated

with parts of the Middle East from 12,500 to 9,500 years ago, owe the

suitably ancient-sounding name to the imagination of a far more recent

pioneer in the world of work, Dorothy Garrod, an archaeologist and a

contemporary of Vere Gordon Childe. She named the Natufians after one of

the archaeological sites where she found evidence of this culture, the Wadi

al Natuf, in what was then British Palestine.

In 1913, Garrod became the first woman to graduate from Cambridge

University with a degree in history. Several years later, after taking a break

from her studies to assist the British war effort, she acquired a postgraduate

qualification in archaeology and anthropology from Oxford University, and

determined it was her destiny to be a field archaeologist. Unsurprisingly,

she struggled to persuade anyone to recruit her on an important dig. Back

then archaeological field sites were the preserve of gin-soaked men with

pipes clenched in their teeth, who believed that women were not built to

cope with the rigors of excavating remote sites in alien lands.

As quietly spoken as she was unflappable, Garrod did not consider

herself a feminist, but she was convinced that women were every bit as

capable of roughing it in the field as their male peers. So was the French

archaeologist Abbé Breuil, with whom she studied in Paris for a couple of

years after leaving Oxford. In 1925 and 1926, he sent her to lead a series of

minor digs in Gibraltar on his behalf. After she returned to Paris, having

successfully retrieved and reassembled a now-famous Neanderthal skull

known as the “Devil’s Tower Child,” her male colleagues had little choice

but to reluctantly acknowledge her skills.

In 1928, with her reputation as a no-nonsense excavator firmly

established, Garrod was invited to lead a series of new excavations on and

around Mount Carmel, on behalf of the American School of Prehistoric

Research and the British School of Anthropology in Jerusalem. Defying

convention, she assembled an almost entirely female team for the Mount

Carmel Project, a good number of whom were recruited from local

Palestinian villages. Over a five-year period, beginning in 1929, she led

twelve major digs in and around Mount Carmel, and in the process

pioneered the use of aerial photography as an aid to excavation. The results

of her efforts were published in a 1937 book, The Stone Age of Mount

Carmel, which she co-authored with another gender-stereotype-busting

archaeologist, Dorothea Bates.

The Stone Age of Mount Carmel was groundbreaking. It was the first

study of any place to chart a continuous archaeological sequence spanning

nearly half a million years of human history. It was also the first to include

sequences of material from both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens

populations. But most importantly of all it was the first to propose that the

area around Mount Carmel was home to a distinctive regional culture

around 12,000 years ago, and that that culture was responsible for the

invention of agriculture.

No one in the Archaeology Department at Cambridge University now

remembers whether or not Dorothy Garrod, who held a professorship there

from 1939 through to her retirement in 1952, liked to end her days with a

sherry or a gin and tonic in the senior fellows common room at Newnham

College where she lived. It was customary to do so before dinners in

college, and as the first woman ever to be appointed to a full professorship

at Cambridge, she must have often needed a drink after spending a day

suffering the snide comments of some of her male colleagues. But the ever-

expanding wealth of new material, supporting her theory that the Natufians

played a pivotal role in the transition to agriculture, includes evidence that

they may well have also been the first people anywhere to relax with an

alcoholic drink after a day’s work. Analyses of microscopic chemical

residues retrieved from the stone pestles and mortars used by Natufians

reveal that these were not only used to pound wheat, barley, and flax into

flours to bake simple unleavened breads,6 but that they were also used for

fermenting grains and brewing beer.

The researchers who established that the Natufians were enthusiastic

home-brewers are almost certainly right to believe that the discovery of

beer hastened the Natufians’ embrace of agriculture and hence a regular

supply of grains to ferment. They may also be right that the beer was used

mainly for ritual purposes.7

But archaeologists and anthropologists alike are often too quick to find

the sacred in the profane, especially when it comes to sex and drugs. In the

same way that some of the famous frescoes were ultimately soft porn, the

Natufians may have drunk beer for the same reasons most of us do now.

The Natufians’ foraging ancestors were almost certainly not beer

drinkers. But they were versatile and skillful foragers, who routinely made

use of more than a hundred individual plant species, among them wheat,

barley,8 wild grapes, almonds, and olives. They were also probably not as

singularly focused on only meeting their immediate needs as people like the

Ju/’hoansi. The sharper transitions between seasons in the Levant during the

last glacial period meant that even if they lived from hand to mouth for

much of the year, they no doubt spent some periods in the year working

harder than others in order to acquire small surpluses to help tide them over

through cold, dark winters.

Some tentative and surprising new evidence suggests that at least one,

presumably very innovative, community who lived near the Sea of Galilee

some 23,000 years ago conducted some early experiments with cultivation.

This supports the idea that foragers in the Levant had a considerably more

delayed-return mindset than others like the Ju/’hoansi. Sadly for this group,

the archaeological evidence also suggests that all they succeeded in doing

was hastening the evolution of some of the weed species that to this day

still frustrate wheat farmers.9

Early experiments with growing food notwithstanding, grains aren’t

thought to have formed a major part of the Natufians’ ancestors’ diets

before the current warm interglacial period began. Back then, wild stands of

wheat, barley, and rye that grew in the Levant were not especially prolific.

They also only ever produced measly grains that sometimes must have been

barely worth the trouble of collecting and then threshing. It would take a

significant, and relatively abrupt, change in climate before these particular

plants would become sufficiently productive to bind their destiny to that of

the humans who occasionally harvested them.

Some more established theories linking climate change to the adoption of

farming are broadly based on the hypothesis that the slow transition from

the last cold glacial period to the current warm, interglacial period, between

18,000 and 8,000 years ago, catalyzed a whole series of ecological changes

that in turn created terrible hardships for some established hunter-gatherer

populations. They suggest that necessity was the mother of invention and

that foragers had little option but to experiment with new strategies to

survive as familiar staples were replaced by new species. Newer research in

a series of related fields has since reaffirmed that climate-change-induced

scarcity played an important role in pushing some human populations down

the path toward being food producers. But they also suggest that periods of

climate-change-induced abundance played an important role in the process

too.

The earth is currently in the grip of its fifth major ice age, known as the

Quaternary Ice Age. The Quaternary Ice Age began around 2.58 million

years ago when the Arctic ice caps began to form, but it has been

characterized by periodic swings between briefer warm “interglacial” and

cool “glacial” periods. During glacial periods average global temperatures

are roughly 9 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than during interglacial periods

and, because lots of water is locked up in ice sheets, they are also

considerably dryer. Glacial periods typically last around 100,000 years, but

interglacial periods—like the one we are in now—are fleeting, lasting only

between 10,000 and 20,000 years. It also often takes up to ten millennia

from the end of a glacial period for global temperatures to climb to levels

historically associated with warmer interglacial periods.

Sunspot activity, cosmic radiation, volcanic eruptions, and celestial

collisions have all played a role in shifting the delicate balance of earth’s

climate in the past. Fossil-fuel-fixated humans are by no means the first or

the only living organism to have substantially changed the atmospheric

composition sufficiently to radically transform the climate. We still have a

long way to go before we make an impact comparable to that made by

carbon dioxide–eating cyanobacteria during the great oxidation event that

preceded the efflorescence of oxygen-breathing life forms on early earth.

But the main reasons that the earth fluctuates between frosty glacial and

milder interglacial periods are shifts in the alignment of the earth’s axis—

the earth’s tendency to wobble slowly as it spins—and changes in the path

of its orbit around the sun as a result of being nudged back and forth by the

gravitational pull of other big celestial bodies.

The earth entered the current warmer period as a result of a convergence

of these cycles some 18,000 years ago. But it was not until 3,300 years later

that anyone would have noticed that anything fundamental had changed.

Then, in the matter of a few short decades, temperatures in Greenland

suddenly soared by a glacier-melting 25 degrees Fahrenheit and in southern

Europe by a more modest, but still utterly transformative, 9 degrees

Fahrenheit. This period of rapid warming, and the two millennia that

followed, is called the Bolling Allerød Interstadial. Over this brief period,

the Middle East was transformed from a chilly dry-steppe ecosystem into a

warm, wet, temperate Eden, hosting forests of oak, olive, almond, and

pistachio, and grasslands replete with wild barley and wheat, where vast

herds of contented gazelle grazed while keeping a watchful eye for lions,

cheetahs, and hungry Natufians.

But it wasn’t only the warmer, wetter conditions that inspired the

Natufians to embrace something resembling a form of proto-agriculture

during this period. Coincident with the retreat of the ice sheets, a small but

significant change in the composition of gases in the earth’s atmosphere

created conditions that enabled cereals, like wheat, to thrive at the expense

of some other plant species.

Not all plants do the work of transforming the inorganic carbon in carbon

dioxide into the organic carbon-based compounds in their living cells in the

same way. Some, such as wheat, beans, barley, rice, and rye, deploy an

enzyme—rubisco—to kidnap passing molecules of carbon dioxide and then

metabolize them into organic compounds. Rubisco, though, is a clumsy

kidnapper and is in the habit of occasionally taking the oxygen molecules

hostage by mistake—a process called photorespiration. This is a costly

error. It wastes the energy and nutrients that went into building the rubisco

and also causes the plant to incur an opportunity cost in terms of its growth.

The frequency with which the rubisco binds with oxygen is more or less

proportional to the amount of oxygen relative to carbon dioxide in the air.

As a result, these “C3” plants, as biologists refer to them, are particularly

responsive to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, because increasing

the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere increases the photosynthesis rate

and decreases the photorespiration rate. By contrast, C4 plants like sugar

cane and millet, which comprise nearly a quarter of all plant species,

metabolize carbon dioxide in a far more orderly fashion. They have evolved

a series of mechanisms that ensure they don’t waste energy on

photorespiration. Consequently they are relatively indifferent to small

increases in carbon dioxide levels but then outperform C3 plants when

carbon dioxide levels decline.

Analysis of Greenlandic ice cores shows that the end of the last glacial

period was marked by a surge in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This process

stimulated increased photosynthesis in C3 plants by between 25 and 50

percent, encouraging them to grow bigger and outmuscle C4 plants in the

competition for soil-based nutrients.10 This in turn stimulated higher levels

of nitrogen in the soil, giving C3 plants a further push.11 As the Middle East

warmed, several species of C3 plants—most notably various grains,

legumes, pulses, and fruiting trees including wheat, barley, lentils, almonds,

and pistachios—thrived, while a whole range of other plant species that

were better adapted to colder conditions fell into decline.

With a warming climate and a more carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere

causing some familiar food species to disappear while simultaneously

ratcheting up the productivity of others, local populations, through no fault

of their own, became increasingly dependent on far fewer but much more

prolific plants.

Foragers are opportunists, and, to the Natufians, the warm Bolling Allerød

period was an opportunity to eat well for much less effort. Their summers

became balmier, their winters lost their brutal edge, it rained more

frequently, and food yields increased so much that over the following

centuries many Natufians cheerfully abandoned their ancestors’ once

necessarily mobile existence in favor of a far more sedentary life in small,

permanent villages. Some Natufians even went to the trouble of building

sturdy drystone-walled dwellings with carefully cobbled floors surrounding

inset stone hearths—the oldest intentionally built permanent structures

discovered anywhere. And if graveyards adjacent to these villages are

anything to go by, these settlements were occupied continuously over many

consecutive generations. Being sedentary also meant that the Natufians

were happy to spend far more time and energy than anyone before them on

building and using unwieldy tools that could not be easily carried from one

camp to the next. Most important among these are the very heavy limestone

and basalt pestles that they used to powder grains, pulp tubers, and, it

seems, make beer.

With so much food about, the Natufians were also able to develop other

skills. Beautifully decorated stone and bone tools, erotically charged stone

sculptures, and elegant jewelry recovered from Natufian archaeological

sites suggest they were happy to spend time making their tools, homes, and

selves look good. We know nothing of the songs they sang, the music they

made, or what they believed, but if the care they took to ensure that their

dead ventured into the afterlife adorned in finery is anything to go by, they

had a rich ritual life too.

Natufian graveyards tell another important story about their lives.

Osteological analyses of Natufian bones and teeth show that they rarely

suffered from systematic dietary deficiencies, or endured the sustained

periods of dietary stress comparable with early farming communities. They

also indicate that Natufians did not have to cope with too much in the way

of arduous physical labor, especially when compared to later farming

populations. Even so, it appears that the Natufians must have endured some

difficulties. The osteological evidence shows that few Natufians in the

permanent settlements lived much beyond thirty years old, perhaps because

they had not yet come to grips with some of the very specific hygiene-

related requirements necessary to live in a permanent village.

The Natufians remained keen hunters during this period and routinely ate

aurochs (the oversized ancestors of modern cattle), wild sheep, ibexes, and

wild asses. They consumed snakes, pine martens, hares, and tortoises as

well, pulled freshwater fish from the river Jordan, and trapped waterfowl

along the river’s banks. But the piles of gazelle bones that litter Natufian

archaeological sites suggest that these were by far their favored source of

protein. And in conjunction with grooved stones that have no obvious

purpose other than to straighten wooden arrow shafts, the Natufian appetite

for gazelles also suggests that they had mastered archery in order to bring

down these animals, among the swiftest and most alert of all ungulates. As

foragers in southern and eastern Africa know all too well, it is near

impossible to hunt creatures like gazelles without good projectile weaponry.

Wild wheat generates much lower food yields than modern domesticated

variants, which is why consumers who eat loaves baked from “ancient

grains” need deep pockets. But compared to most other wild plant foods,

wild cereals are almost uniquely high-yielding. One of the ancient ancestors

of modern wheats, emmer wheat, can achieve yields of up to 3.5 metric tons

per hectare in the right conditions, but yields of between 1 and 1.5 metric

tons per hectare are more common. Einkorn, another ancestor of some

modern wheats, can generate yields of up to 2 metric tons per hectare.

In the 1960s, Jack Harlan, a plant agronomist and an early cheerleader

for the importance of maintaining plant biodiversity, was inspired to

conduct a couple of experiments when, while traveling in southeastern

Turkey, he stumbled across “vast seas of primitive wild wheats” on the

lower slopes of Karacadag, a volcanic mountain. How much wheat might

an ancient Middle Eastern hunter-gatherer have been able to harvest from a

field like this in an hour? he wondered.

In one experiment, Harlan measured how much wild wheat he could

harvest by hand. In another he measured how much he could harvest using

a flint and wood sickle similar to those retrieved by Dorothy Garrod some

thirty years earlier. Using just his hands, he was able to recover a couple of

kilograms of grain in an hour. Using the sickle to cut the wheat before hand-

stripping the grains, he was able to increase that yield by a further 25

percent. Doing so, he noted, resulted in less wastage but most importantly

helped him to spare his soft “urbanized hands” from being rubbed raw. On

the strength of this experiment, he concluded that a “family group,

beginning harvesting near the base of Karacadag and working upslope as

the season progressed could easily harvest . . . over a three-week span or

more and, without working very hard . . . more grain than the family could

possibly consume in a year.”12

Reconstruction of a Natufian stone sickle

If foragers like the Ju/’hoansi enjoyed a form of affluence without

abundance because they had modest desires that were easily met, and lived

in an environment that was only ever capable of sustainably meeting those

modest desires, the Natufians enjoyed a form of affluence based on far

greater material abundance. For a while their landscape was nearly as

spontaneously productive per acre as those of the later agricultural societies

with much bigger populations that followed in their wake. But importantly

the Natufians didn’t have to work nearly as hard. Where future grain

farmers would be held captive to an agricultural calendar, with specific

seasons for plowing, preparing, planting, irrigating, weeding, harvesting,

and processing their crops, all the Natufians had to do was wander out to

established fields of wild stands of wheat, harvest, and process them. But

this abundance was seasonal. They needed to prepare for future lean

seasons, with the result that some periods spent harvesting and storing

additional food were far busier than others. The same archaeologists who

found the evidence for the Natufians’ beer brewing also found micro-

botanical traces in some large stone mortars used by Natufians, which

indicate that these were used for storing grains as long as 13,000 years ago,

and that their discovery of beer was probably a food-storage-related

accident.13

This may be the only indisputable evidence for food storage by early

Natufians, but this does not mean that the Natufians did not find other ways

of storing and preserving food. There is evidence to suggest, for example,

that they made baskets from jute, kenaf, flax, and hemp plant fibers that

have long since decayed into dust. It is also possible that the distinctive pits

found in the cobbled floors of some stone Natufian dwellings were larders

of a sort. And given the prolific numbers of gazelle they killed, it is almost

certain that they occasionally preserved meat, probably by drying it.

Cereals and legumes were by no means the only floral beneficiaries of a

warming climate. Many other plants prospered too, and during this period

of abundance Natufians dined on a host of different tubers, fungi, nuts,

gums, fruits, stalks, leaves, and flowers.14 But what likely nudged the

Natufians further down the line from being casual consumers of grains with

a taste for sour beer into intensive managers of wild cereals and

accumulators of big surpluses was another, far less cheerful period of

climatic upheaval.

Over the course of the first 1,800 years of the Bolling Allerød, the climate

cooled gradually but never to the extent that anyone would have noticed

much of a difference from one year to the next. Then, sometime around

12,900 years ago, temperatures suddenly plunged. In Greenland, average

temperatures fell by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit over two decades,

with the result that glaciers that had been in full retreat began to rapidly

advance again, tundra refroze, and the ice caps began to muscle their way

rapidly southward. Outside of the polar regions, temperature declines were

less severe but no less transformative. Across most of Europe and the

Middle East, it must have seemed to many that they had returned to a

glacial period almost overnight.

It is uncertain what caused this sudden cold snap, referred to by

paleoclimatologists as the Younger Dryas. Explanations have ranged from

cosmic supernovae that messed with the earth’s protective ozone layer to a

massive meteor impact somewhere in North America.15 They are also

unclear as to how severe the ecological impact was in different locations.

There is, for example, no evidence to indicate that the levels of atmospheric

carbon dioxide declined during the Younger Dryas, or that it had much

impact at all in places like southern and eastern Africa. It is also uncertain

whether during this period the Levant was cold and dry like the preceding

glacial period or whether it was cold but still relatively wet.16 But there is

no doubt that the sudden and unwelcome return of long, freezing winters

and abbreviated cool summers caused substantial declines in the yields of

many of the key plant foods the Natufians had grown used to over

preceding millennia, and that as a result they would have simultaneously

lost faith in both the providence of their environment and their ability to

spend most of the year focused only on meeting their immediate needs.

We know that not long after the temperatures plummeted, the Natufians

were forced to abandon their permanent villages because the immediate

environments were no longer sufficiently food-dense to support them year-

round. We also know that after 1,300 long years of miserable weather,

temperatures suddenly surged upward again, just as abruptly as they had

fallen.

But beyond this we can only speculate as to how they coped with these

changes and, more importantly, how their efforts to make sense of them

changed their relationships with their environments. If the archaeological

record for the period immediately following the Younger Dryas is anything

to go by, these changes were profound.

The first obvious indication that by then foragers in the Levant had lost

confidence in the eternal providence of their environment are the broken

remains of purpose-built granaries, the most impressive of which had

storage areas sufficient to store up to ten tons of wheat. These were

excavated by archaeologists near the banks of the Dead Sea in Jordan and

have been dated to when the Younger Dryas came to an abrupt end 11,500

years ago.17 They were not just simple chambers; these mud, stone, and

straw buildings had elevated wooden floors that were cleverly designed

specifically to keep pests at bay and prevent moisture. Tellingly, they were

located adjacent to what appear to have been food-distribution buildings. It

is also clear that these were not spontaneous designs; even if archaeologists

have not yet found evidence for older, more primitive granaries, the ones

they excavated were the product of many generations of experimentation

and elaboration.

A monolithic “zookeeper” at Göbekli Tepe

But by far the most compelling evidence that something fundamental had

changed over the course of the Younger Dryas was a more ambitious and

skillful construction than even the largest of these granaries. And this took

the form of what for now is thought to be the oldest example of

monumental architecture in the ancient world: a complex of buildings,

chambers, megaliths, and passageways discovered at Göbekli Tepe in the

hills near Orencik in southeastern Turkey in 1994. With construction at

Göbekli Tepe having begun during the tenth millennium BC, it is also by far

the oldest evidence of large groups of people anywhere coming together to

work on a very big project that had nothing obvious to do with the food

quest.

The ruins at Göbekli Tepe were once described by their discoverer, the

German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, as a “Stone Age zoo.”18 It is a fair

description of what is arguably the most enigmatic of all prehistoric

monuments. But it was not only because of the near-countless animal

bones, from some twenty-one different mammal and sixty bird species,

which have been recovered from the site and which are thought to be the

leftovers from sumptuous feasts, that persuaded Schmidt to describe it as a

zoo. It was also because carved into each of the estimated 240 limestone

monoliths organized into series of imposing dry-stone-walled enclosures is

a veritable ark of ancient animal life. Included among the images are

scorpions, adders, spiders, lizards, snakes, foxes, bears, boars, ibis, vultures,

hyenas, and wild asses. Most pose in low relief and take the form of

engravings. But some of the most impressive among them are carved in

high relief or take the form of free-standing statues and statuettes.

Schmidt’s zoo analogy didn’t end with the animals alone. For presiding

over this lithic menagerie and standing at the center of each enclosure is a

procession of giant limestone zookeepers in the form of matched pairs of T-

shaped monoliths. Each of these stands sixteen to twenty-three feet tall and

the largest weigh up to eight tons. The most impressive among these

formidable slabs of precisely worked limestone are very obviously

anthropomorphic. They have human arms and hands carved into them as

well as ornamental belts, patterned garments, and loincloths.

There is nothing modest about this monument. Göbekli Tepe’s builders

were obviously not restrained in their ambitions by the jealousy-fueled

mockery that sustained the fierce egalitarianism of small-scale hunter-

gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi. They also clearly did not consider time away

from the food quest as time for private pleasures. Constructing this complex

of winding passageways linking rectangular chambers and imposing

ovulate enclosures, the largest of which has a similar diameter to the dome

in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, took a considerable amount of time,

energy, organization, and, above all, work.

Only a small proportion of the site has been excavated, but at over 22

acres in size it is many orders of magnitude larger than Stonehenge and

three times larger than Athens’s Parthenon. So far, seven enclosures have

been excavated, and geophysical surveys suggest that there are at least

thirteen more buried in the hill.

Unlike many later monuments, this complex was built piecemeal. New

enclosures were added periodically over the course of a thousand years,

with some older structures being back-filled and new ones built on top of

them. Construction was also almost certainly seasonal and done in the

winter months. And, given that people back then were lucky to live beyond

forty years, it is unlikely that anyone who participated in the start of the

construction on any one of the bigger enclosures would have still been alive

to witness its completion.

Up until the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, the established narrative of how

early farming societies were able to build some monuments was simple.

Buildings this big were as much monuments to the surpluses generated by

intensive agriculture as they were to the ingenuity and vanity of their

makers, and the might of the gods or kings they were built to honor. This is

because the building of structures like these required not only leaders with

the ambition and power to organize their construction, but also plenty of

skilled and unskilled manpower to do the hard work.

But ever since Klaus Schmidt and his team started burrowing into the hill

at Göbekli Tepe in 1994, it has become clear that this narrative was much

too simple. And the deeper Schmidt and his growing battalion of

archaeologists dug, and the more samples they dated, the more it revealed

that the historical dynamic between agriculture, culture, and work was far

more complex, and far more interesting, than anyone had ever imagined.

Göbekli Tepe, they revealed, was not a monument made by well-established

farming peoples. Instead construction of it began around 11,600 years ago,

more than a millennium earlier than the appearance of domesticated cereals

or animal bones in the archaeological record.19

Enigmatic sites like Göbekli Tepe are easily forced into serving as props for

all sorts of fantasies. It has been variously declared to be the remains of the

biblical Tower of Babel, an oversized catalog of the creatures that were

herded into Noah’s Ark, and a temple complex constructed under the

supervision of an ancient race of guardian angels assigned by God to watch

over Eden.

Based on the prevalence of hyenas, vultures, and other scavengers

engraved in the pillars, as well as the recent recovery of some human skull

parts that show signs of manipulation and decoration, some have speculated

that Göbekli Tepe may, for a while at least, have housed an ancient “skull

cult.”20 Other possible interpretations of the site by archaeologists have

veered between the sacred, in the form of a temple complex, and the

profane, in the form of an ancient nightclub that hosted great feasts.

Göbekli Tepe will always cling to its deepest secrets. But at least its

importance in the history of our species’ relationship with work is clear. For

beyond being a monument to the first experiments with agriculture, it is the

first evidence anywhere of people securing sufficient surplus energy to

work over many consecutive generations to achieve a grand vision

unrelated to the immediate challenge of securing more energy, and one that

was intended to endure long beyond the lives of its builders.

Göbekli Tepe may not be anything near the scale and complexity of the

Egyptian pyramids or Mayan temples built by more recent agricultural

societies. But its construction must have demanded a similarly complex

division of labor and skilled masons, artists, carvers, designers, and

carpenters, who depended on others to feed them. It is, in other words, the

first unambiguous evidence of a society in which many people had

something resembling full-time, highly specialized jobs.

FEASTS AND FAMINES

Some 2,000 years after the first monoliths at Göbekli Tepe were erected,

something persuaded dozens if not hundreds of ancient Anatolians to

assemble there and then spend months—perhaps even years—

systematically filling in each of its deep passageways, chambers, and

enclosures with rubble and sand until the site was transformed into a

nondescript hill that within a few short years would become overgrown and

dissolve into an already undulating landscape.

For at least a thousand years after the construction of Göbekli Tepe,

foraging still played an important role in ancient Anatolian life. The

archaeological record indicates that, initially at least, there were many

communities in the Levant who turned their noses up at the idea of

engaging in even low-level food production. But over time, as communities

across the Middle East grew more dependent on farmed grains, their fields

and farms displaced wild animal and plant populations, making it

increasingly hard for even the most determined foragers to sustain

themselves by hunting and gathering alone.

As a result, by the time of Göbekli Tepe’s inhumation, 9,600 years ago,

much of the Middle East had been transformed into a network of small

agricultural settlements and at least one town-size settlement, Çatalhöyük,

in south central Turkey, which at its peak is thought to have been home to

more than 6,000 people. These settlements stretched from the Sinai

Peninsula through to eastern Turkey and inland along the banks of the

Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. Domesticated variants of wheat and other

crops, as well as the tools used to harvest, process, and store them, litter

many regional archaeological sites from this period, as do the bones of

sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs—even if some of the highly distinctive

physical features we associate with fully domesticated cattle and pigs—like

the humps on some cattle breeds—only appear widely in the archaeological

record.1 There is also evidence to suggest that some Levantines had even

taken to the seas and settled in Crete and Cyprus, which would in time serve

as a launch pad for the expansion of farming people into southern Europe

and beyond.

There is no doubt the mass burial of Göbekli Tepe’s giant zookeepers

alongside their silent stone menageries was a very well-organized act of

vandalism, one that required similar levels of commitment to that which its

makers brought to the job of building it in the first place. Humans, like

masked weavers, often seem to take as much pleasure in destroying things

as they do in making them, and history is punctuated by many other

similarly monumental acts of architectural erasure. The clumsy dynamiting

of the temples and tombs in the ancient Semitic city of Palmyra a few short

hours’ drive from Göbekli Tepe by the angry young men of ISIS is just one

of many recent examples.

We will never know what motivated the Anatolians to bury Göbekli Tepe

under rubble. But if its construction was a celebration of the abundance its

builders enjoyed as a result of learning to intensively manage wild crops

and accrue and store surpluses at the end of the Younger Dryas, it is

tempting to imagine that two millennia later their descendants destroyed it

convinced that the serpents carved into Göbekli Tepe’s monoliths had

banished them into a life of eternal toil. For, by any measure, early

agricultural populations lived tougher lives than the builders of Göbekli

Tepe did. Indeed, it would take several thousand years before any farming

populations anywhere had the energy, resources, or inclination to devote

much time to building grand monuments to either themselves or their gods.

As farming societies grew more productive and captured more energy

from their environments, energy appeared to be scarcer and people had to

work harder to meet their basic needs. This was because, up until the

Industrial Revolution, any gains in productivity farming peoples generated

as a result of working harder, adopting new technologies, techniques, or

crops, or acquiring new land were always soon gobbled up by populations

that quickly grew to numbers that could not be sustained. As a result, while

agricultural societies continued to expand, prosperity was usually only ever

fleeting, and scarcity evolved from an occasional inconvenience that

foragers stoically endured every once in a while to a near perennial

problem. In many respects, the hundreds of generations of farmers who

lived before the fossil-fuel revolution paid for our extended lifespans and

expanded waistlines now by enduring lives that were mostly shorter,

bleaker, and harder than ours, and almost certainly tougher than those of

their foraging ancestors.

It is hard to argue that a long and miserable life is any better than an

abbreviated and joyful one. Even so, life expectancy is still a rough proxy

for material and physical well-being. Demographers typically use two

measures of life expectancy: life expectancy at birth and life expectancy

after reaching the age of fifteen. These numbers tend to be wildly different

in all pre-industrial societies because the high numbers of deaths during

childbirth, infancy, and early childhood send the total average plummeting.

Thus while foraging Ju/’hoansi and Hadzabe had a life expectancy at birth

of thirty-six and thirty-four years respectively, those who reached puberty

would be considered very unlucky if they did not live well beyond sixty.2

Comprehensive demographic data documenting births, deaths, and age at

death only ever began to be systematically collected anywhere in the

eighteenth century. The first places to do so were Sweden, Finland, and

Denmark, and it is for this reason that their data appear in so many studies

looking at changes in life expectancy around the time of the European

Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Life-expectancy data on

earlier farming populations is more incomplete. It comes mainly from the

osteological analysis of bones retrieved from ancient cemeteries. But this is

hardly a reliable resource, not least because we have no idea as to whether

the same funerary rights were afforded to everyone and hence how

representative bones recovered from cemeteries are. Some later farming

populations have the benefit of funerary inscriptions on gravestones and

sometimes even partial census data, as in the case of Roman Egypt, but

again this data is usually too incomplete to serve as anything more than a

rough guide. Even if demographers are cautious when making

pronouncements regarding life expectancy in early agricultural societies,

there is broad consensus that before the Industrial Revolution kicked into

gear and significant advances in medicine began to make an impact, the

agricultural revolution did nothing at all to extend the lifespan of the

average person, and indeed in many instances shortened it relative to the

lifespans of remote foragers like the Ju/’hoansi. A comprehensive study of

human remains from Imperial Rome, arguably the wealthiest agricultural

society in history, for instance, shows that most men there were lucky to

live much past the age of thirty,3 and analysis of the earliest well-

documented mortality figures, which come from Sweden between 1751 and

1759, suggests that the Ju/’hoansi and the Hadzabe expected to live slightly

longer lives than Europeans on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution.4

Osteological studies of ancient bones and teeth also offer some insights

into the quality of ancient people’s lives. These show not only that early

farmers had to work a whole lot harder than foragers did, but also that the

rewards they gained from all this additional back-breaking effort were often

marginal at best. Thus, when the remains of the pampered elites are

excluded from the equation, graveyards from all the world’s great

agricultural civilizations through to the Industrial Revolution tell an

enduring tale of systematic nutritional deficiencies, anemia, episodic

famines, and bone deformations as a result of repetitive, arduous labor, in

addition to an alarming array of horrendous and sometimes fatal work-

induced injuries. The biggest trove of very early farmers’ bones comes from

Çatalhöyük. These reveal a bleak picture of “elevated exposure to disease

and labor demands in response to community dependence on and

production of domesticated plant carbohydrates, growing population size

and density fueled by elevated fertility, and increasing stresses due to

heightened workload . . . over the nearly 12 centuries of settlement

occupation.”5

Both ancient farmers and foragers suffered seasonal food shortages. During

these periods children and adults alike would go to bed hungry some days

and everyone would lose fat and muscle. But over longer periods of time

farming societies were far more likely to suffer severe, existentially

threatening famines than foragers.6 Foraging may be much less productive

and generate far lower energy yields than farming but it is also much less

risky. This is firstly because foragers tended to live well within the natural

limits imposed by their environments rather than skate perpetually on its

dangerous verges, and secondly because where subsistence farmers

typically relied on one or two staple crops, foragers in even the bleakest

environments relied on dozens of different food sources and so were usually

able to adjust their diets to align with an ecosystem’s own dynamic

responses to changing conditions. Typically, in complex ecosystems when

weather one year proves unsuitable for one set of plant species, it almost

inevitably suits others. But in farming societies when harvests fail as a

result of, for example, a sustained drought, then catastrophe looms.

For early farming communities, droughts, floods, and untimely frosts

were by no means the only existential environmental risks. A whole host of

pests and pathogens could also lay waste to their crops and herds. Those

who focused their energy on rearing livestock learned quickly that one of

the costs of selecting in favor of traits like docility was that it made their

livestock easy pickings for predators, with the result that they required near

constant supervision. It also meant that they had to build enclosures for

their safety. But in penning their livestock into cramped enclosures at night,

they inadvertently hastened the evolution and spread of a whole host of new

viral bacterial and fungal pathogens. Even now few things evoke panic in

livestock farming communities as easily as an outbreak of foot-and-mouth

disease or bovine pleuropneumonia.

For cultivators, the list of potential threats was even longer. Like herders,

they also had to cope with wild animals, but in their case the set of

potentially problematic species was more than a few sharp-toothed apex

predators in search of an easy meal. As remains the case for cultivators, in

places like Kavango in northern Namibia, the range of pests extends well

beyond the aphids, birds, rabbits, fungi, slugs, and blowflies that frustrate

urban horticulturists. It includes several species that individually weigh

more than a ton, most notorious among them being elephants and hippos,

and others, like monkeys and baboons, with the speed, agility, and

intelligence to find their way past any protective measures a diligent farmer

might put in place, as well as a whole host of hungry insect species.

In domesticating some crops, early farmers also played a vital role in

speeding the evolution of a whole series of pathogens, parasites, and pests.

Natural selection helped them to adapt to and piggyback on nearly every

intervention the farmers made in their environments, and unsurprisingly

followed closely behind farmers wherever they went. Foremost among

these were weeds. While the concept of a weed remains simply a plant in

the wrong place, there are a number of species of plants that, despite being

considered undesirable from a human perspective and actively eradicated

by farmers, owe their now extraordinary resilience to their adaptation to

survive, despite the efforts of farmers who over the years have worked

countless hours variously poisoning them or ripping them from the soil.

Most notable among these are the extended family of Middle Eastern arable

weeds that have since spread across the world and have adapted very

quickly to every imaginable agricultural niche, and which have developed

dormancy cycles closely aligned to those of wheat and barley.

Early farmers’ livestock and crops were not the only victims of these new

pathogens. The farmers were too. Their livestock in particular were fifth

columnists who quietly introduced a whole new suite of lethal pathogens to

humanity. Currently, zoonotic pathogens (those passed on by animals)

account for nearly 60 percent of all human diseases and three-quarters of all

emerging diseases. This translates to roughly 2.5 billion cases of human

sickness and 2.7 million deaths every year.7 Some of these come from the

rats, fleas, and bedbugs that flourish in the dark corners of human

settlements, but most come from the domestic animals we depend on for

meat, milk, leather, eggs, transport, hunting, and, ironically in the case of

cats, pest control. Included among them are a bucketload of gastrointestinal

diseases, bacterial pathogens like anthrax and tuberculosis, parasites like

toxoplasmosis, and viral pathogens like measles and influenza. And our

history of consuming wild animals from pangolins to bats has introduced

numerous pathogens to our species, including SARS and SARS-CoV-2

coronavirus. The difference is that in the deep past when human populations

were considerably smaller and widely dispersed, these outbreaks usually

died off as soon as they killed their hosts or their hosts developed an

immunity to the pathogens.

These microscopic pathogens are less mysterious now than they were in

the past. We also have a measure of control over some of them, even if

evolution will always ensure that this control is only ever temporary. But in

pre-industrial farming societies, these accomplished and invisible murderers

were angels of death visited upon them by angry gods. And, as if to add

insult to injury, because diets in pre-industrial farming societies tended to

be erratic and dominated by only one or two crops, people also often

suffered from systemic nutritional deficiencies that left them ill equipped to

resist or recover from diseases that most well-nourished people would have

shrugged off.

Another critical environmental challenge ancient farmers faced was the

fact that the same patch of soil could not keep producing reliable harvests

year after year. For those who were lucky enough to farm in alluvial

floodplains where periodic floods conveniently refreshed topsoils, this was

not an eternal problem. But for others it was a harsh lesson in the challenges

of sustainability, which they solved mainly by moving to new, under-

exploited turf, so speeding the expansion of agriculture across Europe,

India, and Southeast Asia. Rudimentary crop-cycling systems based on

switching grains with legumes, or leaving a field fallow once in a while,

were adopted in many early agricultural societies but it would take until the

eighteenth century before the benefits of long-cycle sequential crop rotation

were properly established anywhere, with the result that early farmers

everywhere must have experienced the same sense of frustration, followed

by impending doom, when despite the weather being just right, the seed

stock plentiful, and the pests under control, they ended up producing

anemic harvests inadequate to sustain them for the year ahead.

There are plenty of written records documenting the many catastrophes

that have befallen agricultural societies since the classical era. But there are

no such records for the first 6,000 years of farming or among non-literate

agricultural societies. Up until recently, archaeologists based their belief

that similar catastrophes also afflicted early farming societies on evidence

indicating the spontaneous collapse of populations or abandonment of

towns, settlements, and villages in the ancient world. Now, clear evidence

of these collapses has been found in our genomes. Comparisons of ancient

and modern genomes in Europe, for example, point to sequences of

catastrophes that wiped out between 40 and 60 percent of established

populations, dramatically reducing the genetic diversity of their

descendants. These genetic bottleneck events clearly coincided with the

expansion of farming societies through central Europe around 7,500 years

ago, and then later into northwestern Europe about 6,000 years ago.8

Depleted soils, diseases, famines, and later conflicts were recurrent

causes of catastrophe in farming societies. But these only ever briefly

stalled the rise of agriculture. Even despite these challenges, farming was

ultimately much more productive than foraging, and populations almost

always recovered within a few generations, so sowing the seeds for a future

collapse, amplifying their anxieties about scarcity, and encouraging their

expansion into new space.

Entropy’s eternal diktat that the more complex a structure, the more work

must be done to build and maintain it applies as much to our societies as it

does to our bodies. It takes work to transform clay into bricks and bricks

into buildings in the same way it takes energy to transform fields of grain

into loaves of bread. Accordingly, the complexity of any particular society

at any particular time is often a useful measure for the quantities of energy

that they capture, and also the amount of work (in the raw, physical sense of

the word) that is needed to build and then maintain this complexity.

The problem is that inferring the quantities of energy captured and then

put to work by different societies at different times over the course of

human history is hard, not least because it depends on where and how the

energy was sourced and how efficiently it was used. Unsurprisingly,

researchers only rarely agree on the detail. There is thus lots of debate as to

whether energy-capture rates by Romans during the height of their empire

were broadly equivalent to those of peasants in Europe on the cusp of the

Industrial Revolution, or more akin to those that characterized the earlier

agricultural states.9 But there is broad agreement that human history is

marked by a sequence of surges in the amount of energy captured as new

energy sources were added to those already in use. Nor do they disagree

that on a per capita basis, those of us living in the world’s more

industrialized countries have an energy footprint in the region of fifty times

that of people in small-scale foraging societies and close to tenfold greater

than that in most pre-industrial societies. There is also a broad consensus

that after the initial mastering of fire, two processes have dramatically

amplified energy-capture rates. The more recent was the intensive

exploitation of fossil fuels associated with the Industrial Revolution. But in

terms of work, the most important energy revolution was farming.

Adults in the United States consume on average around 3,600

kilocalories of food per day,10 mainly in the form of refined starches,

proteins, fats, and sugar. This is a good deal more than the recommended

2,000–2,500 kilocalories per day necessary to stay healthy. Despite the

tendency to eat more food than is actually good for us, energy from food

now accounts for a tiny proportion of the total energy we capture and put to

work. But the energy footprint of food production is another matter.

Because plants need carbon dioxide to grow and soils have the capacity

to sequester carbon, agriculture could theoretically be climate neutral, or

potentially even sequester more carbon dioxide than it emits. Instead, the

process of growing food to eat has a massive energy footprint. If you

include the systematic clearing of forests and the conversion of grassland

into arable land in the calculation, then agriculture now accounts for up to a

third of all greenhouse gas emissions. Much of the remainder comes from

the manufacture and decomposition of fertilizers, the power required to

manufacture and run farm machinery, the infrastructure necessary to

process, store, and transport food products, and the megatons of methane

that escape the bloated guts of livestock.

In modern industrialized societies, where most of our energy is sourced

from burning fossil fuels, carbon footprints offer a rough proxy for energy

capture. It is only a rough proxy because a minor but nevertheless growing

proportion of the energy we use is now sourced from “renewables” like

wind, and we are getting far better at using energy more efficiently and

incurring lower net losses to heat. This means that in most instances a

pound of coal does much more useful work than it used to.

Over the course of the half-million years or so between their mastering of

fire and the first tentative experiments with agriculture, the quantities of

energy captured and used by our foraging ancestors did not change a great

deal. There was little difference between the energy-capture rates of the

Ju/’hoansi foragers Richard Lee worked with in 1963 and the archaic

humans who warmed themselves by their fires in Wonderwerk Cave. This is

not to say that all foragers had precisely the same rates of energy capture or

that all did the same amount of work. The proportion of meat in their diets

made a difference, as did where they lived. The total energy captured over

the course of a year by the ivory-carving foragers in Sunghir in present-day

Russia 35,000 years ago, for example, was larger than any of the foragers

living in warm climates at any time in the last 100,000 years. They had to

build sturdier shelters to withstand winter storms, make heavy-duty clothing

and footwear, burn more fuel on their fires, and eat more energy-rich food

simply to maintain their body temperature. This means that if foragers in

southern and eastern Africa captured perhaps 2,000 kilocalories per day in

food energy and maybe a thousand more in non-food energy (in the form of

fuel or resources to make tools like their spears or ostrich-eggshell

ornaments), then it’s likely that foragers in the icy north may have needed

to capture around double that to survive during the coldest months.

While the volume of food produced for human consumption today is

staggering, the number of distinct plant and animal species we routinely

consume is not. Despite the fact that in most of the world’s cities, one can

now eat cuisine from countries from every continent, only the most

cosmopolitan have a diet approaching the diversity of hunter-gatherers

living in territories not much larger than a suburb in a modern city. The

majority of land under cultivation across the globe is used for the purposes

of growing a limited number of high-energy-yielding crops. Nearly two-

thirds of it is now used for growing cereals (mainly wheat, maize, rice, and

barley). The next largest crop category, accounting for roughly one-tenth of

all land under cultivation, is devoted to producing oil-based crops like

canola and palm oil for cooking, cosmetics, and other applications. The

remaining 30 percent or so of land under cultivation forms a patchwork of

pulses, sugar crops, roots and tubers, fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, teas,

coffees, non-food crops like cotton, and also narcotics like coca leaves and

tobacco. Part of the reason for the huge tracts of land used for cultivating

high-yielding cereals, other than the fact that it provides us with low-cost

carbohydrate-rich calories, is that it is needed to fatten domestic animals,

which are farmed on roughly 75 percent of all agricultural land, to

slaughter-weight as quickly as possible, or assist them to produce

prodigious quantities of milk, meat, and eggs.

Every single one of the many thousands of different plant species that

humans have historically harvested for food is theoretically domesticable,

given enough time and energy or access to the technologies to manipulate

its genome. In herbariums and botanic gardens across the world, botanists

frequently mimic the conditions necessary to successfully cultivate even the

most temperamental and sensitive plants, and quickly develop new cultivars

that are robust enough for amateur gardeners in many different

environments to shovel them into their shrubberies without worrying too

much. But some plant species are far easier to domesticate, because there

are fewer steps to develop strains that can be reliably grown and harvested

at scale. Some are also far more economic to domesticate, because they

generate more energy for consumption than is needed to grow them

successfully in the first place. The economics of domestication are now

shaped as much by anticipated necessity as they are by the vagaries of food

faddism and the existence of elites prepared to pay a great deal of money

for exotic products like truffles, which are hugely expensive to propagate.

Historically, the economics of domestication hinged almost entirely on

energy returns alone.

Neolithic Middle East

To biologists, domestication is just one among many examples of

mutualism, the form of symbiosis which occurs when the interactions

between organisms from different species benefit them both. Intersecting

networks of mutualistic relationships sustain all complex ecosystems and

occur at every imaginable level, from the smallest bacteria to the largest

organisms like trees or big mammals. And while not all mutualistic

relationships are essential to the survival of one or other of the species,

many are based on mutual dependency. Some of the most obvious include

the relationship between plants and the bees, flies, and other creatures that

pollinate them; animals like buffalo and the egrets and oxpeckers that

remove parasites like ticks; or the thousands of species of trees that depend

on animals to consume their fruit and then disperse their seeds in their scat.

Other less immediately obvious ones include our relationships with some of

the many species of bacteria that inhabit our guts and aid us, for instance, in

the digestion of cellulose.

The relationship between a farmer and their wheat is of course different

in many important ways from most other mutualistic relationships. For

domesticated wheat to reproduce, it needs first to be threshed by farmers to

release its seeds from the rachis—the fibrous packaging—it is enclosed in.

There are only a handful of species like wheat that depend on specific

interventions or attention from a different genetically unrelated species to

nudge them through a significant milestone in their life cycle. But as rare as

it is, cultivation is usually a particularly successful form of mutualism, as

evidenced by the success of the few other species that cultivate food, like

fungus-farming termites.

Some plant species, like the wild wheat and barley of Anatolia and the

indigenous millet in East Asia, almost invited domestication. A

characteristic of pretty much all the founder crops, like these that form the

basis of our diet today and were domesticated thousands of years ago, is

that because they were already high-yielding and self-pollinating, it took

relatively few generations before they achieved the mutations characteristic

of domesticity. In the case of wheat, for example, the mutation for its brittle

rachis was controlled by a single gene that was already a frequent mutation

in most stands of wild wheat, along with the mutations that produced larger

seeds.

Just as importantly, some ancient environments were better incubators of

plant domestication than others. It is no coincidence that a significant

majority of the plants that we now think of as staples originated between 20

and 35 degrees north of the equator in the Old World, and 15 degrees south

and 20 degrees north of the equator in the Americas, all of which were

temperate, had seasonally distinct rainfall patterns, and were as well suited

to growing annuals as they were perennials. It is also no coincidence that

when agriculture spread, it did so, initially at least, within these broad

latitudes.

In several centers of domestication where there were no indigenous high-

yielding, energy-rich cereals, it was hard for populations to achieve the

energy surpluses necessary to build and sustain big cities or centralized

states. This is one of the reasons why among many of the “horticulturist”

cultures in Oceania, South and North America, and East Asia, who

domesticated relatively low-yielding crops, and whose energy-capture rates

rarely much exceeded those achieved by foragers, agriculture never really

got out of first gear and populations remained relatively small, dispersed,

and mobile. They also typically enjoyed much more free time than people

living in societies where they depended primarily or exclusively on

agriculture. This is why to European sailors like the crews on Captain

Cook’s grand voyages, the Melanesian islands seemed like paradises in

which the locals rarely had to do more than pluck fruit from trees or fish

from the abundant seas.

In some instances, it took thousands of generations of painfully slow

artificial selection before domesticated cultivars generated yields

comparable to those of grain producers in the Middle East or rice and millet

farmers in East Asia. This is why even though the basal form of maize arose

as a result of five relatively common mutations that occurred in the genome

of its ancestor plant, teosinte, perhaps some 9,000 years ago, it took close to

8,000 years before anyone produced maize crops of sufficient scale to

support populations and cities of a similar size to those that flourished in the

Mediterranean from around seven millennia earlier.

But if the trajectory of human history was shaped by those farming

societies with the highest-yielding, most productive, energy-rich crops, why

was life in these societies so much more laborious than it was for foragers?

This was a question that preoccupied the Reverend Thomas Robert

Malthus, one of the most influential of the Enlightenment’s cohort of

pioneering economists who, like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, were

trying to understand why in seventeenth-century England poverty had

endured despite advances in food production.

Thomas Robert Malthus suffered from syndactyly. This genetic condition

often manifests, among other things, in an individual’s fingers and toes

being fused together, which persuaded his students at the East India

Company College, where he was Professor of History and Political

Economy from 1805, to grant him the nickname “web-toe.” But worse was

yet to come. Within a few decades of his death in 1834, An Essay on the

Principle of Population, by far his most important work, in which he argued

that overpopulation would lead to societal collapse, would be ridiculed

again and again as a piece of apocalyptic hysteria and his name become a

synonym for unfounded pessimism.

History has been unkind to Malthus. He was not perpetually pessimistic

as he is often portrayed. Even if much of the detail of his most famous

argument was wrong, the simple principle behind it was right. More than

this, his arguments about the relationship between productivity and

population growth offer a compelling insight into how the transition to

agriculture reshaped our species’ relationship with scarcity, so giving rise to

the “economic problem.”

The main problem that Malthus set out to solve was simple. Why, he

wondered, after centuries of incremental progress that raised agricultural

productivity, did most people still work so hard and yet live in poverty? He

proposed two answers. The first was theological: Malthus believed that evil

“exists in the world not to create despair, but activity,” by which he meant

that it was always part of God’s plan to ensure that His earthly flock would

never prosper to the point that they could afford to be idle. The second was

demographic.

Malthus observed that agricultural output only ever grew

“arithmetically,” whereas population, which he calculated (erroneously)

tended to double naturally every twenty-five years, grew “geometrically” or

exponentially. He believed that, as a result of this imbalance, whenever

improvements in agricultural productivity increased total food supply,

peasants would inevitably set about creating more mouths to feed, with the

result that any per capita surplus was soon lost. He viewed land as an

ultimate constraint on the amount of food that could be grown, noting that

the marginal utility of additional labor in agriculture diminished rapidly,

because having ten people work a small field of wheat that was once easily

managed by one would not result in ten times the wheat, but instead result

in a diminishing share of its yield for each of those who worked it. Malthus

was of the view that the relationship between population and productivity

was ultimately self-regulating, and that whenever population growth

overtook productivity, a famine or some other form of collapse would soon

reduce the population down to a more manageable level. On the basis of his

calculations, Malthus insisted that Britain, which was going through a huge

population spurt at the time courtesy of the Industrial Revolution, was due

an imminent and severe correction.

Malthus’s bruised reputation now is not only a result of the fact that the

collapse he insisted was imminent didn’t occur. Neither is it because his

warnings were enthusiastically embraced by fascists to justify their

enthusiasm for genocide and eugenics. It is also because when viewed

through a contemporary lens his argument does a remarkable job of

upsetting people across the political spectrum. Malthus’s insistence that

there are clear limits to growth upsets those who support unbridled free

markets and perpetual growth, and chimes favorably with those who are

concerned about sustainability. But his insistence that the majority of people

will always be poor because inequality and suffering are part of God’s

divine plan pleases some religious conservatives, yet gravely offends many

on the secular left.

No one disputes that Malthus radically underestimated the extent to

which food production in the fossil-fuel era would keep pace with a surging

global population, nor that he failed to anticipate the trend in industrialized

societies toward steadily declining birth rates that began almost as soon as

his essay was published. Yet despite this, his observation that, historically,

population growth gobbled up any benefits yielded by improvements in

productivity was accurate for the period of human history beginning when

people started producing food and generating surpluses, through to the

Industrial Revolution. It also helped explain why those societies that were

the most economically productive tended to expand at the expense of those

that were not.

Two parts of Malthus’s legacy endure. First, whenever an improvement in a

society’s agricultural or economic output is diluted as a result of population

growth, it is now convention to describe this as a “Malthusian trap.”

Economic historians who like to reduce global history to the dull metric of

“real incomes” have found no shortage of good evidence of Malthusian

traps catching out unsuspecting societies all over the world before the

Industrial Revolution. And in every instance, they note, where a surge in

agricultural productivity as a result of a clever new technology made one or

two lucky generations thrive, population growth quickly restored everything

back to a more miserly baseline. They have also noted the opposite effect

when populations declined suddenly as a result of disease or war. Thus, for

instance, once the initial shock caused by the huge numbers of deaths from

the bubonic plague in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century died down,

average material living standards and real wages improved considerably for

a couple of generations, before populations recovered and living standards

declined to their historical average.

Second, he put his finger on one of the main reasons that people in

agricultural societies had to work so hard. Malthus believed that the reason

peasants bred so enthusiastically is because of raw uncontrolled lust. But

there is another, more important reason too. Farmers were all too aware of

the correspondence between how hard they worked and how well they

might eat over the course of a year. There were many variables that they

couldn’t control when it came to making sure they took in an adequate

harvest and the health of their livestock—like droughts, floods, and disease

—but there were many variables that they could manage. There were also

things they could do to limit the impact of big, near-existential risks, and all

of these involved work. The problem was that there was rarely labor to

spare, and for most farmers the only obvious solution to this problem was to

procreate. But in doing so they stumbled into one of Malthus’s snares. For

each new laborer they gave birth to was not only an additional mouth to

feed, but after a point resulted in a noticeable decline in food yields per

person.

This left farmers with few options: go hungry, take land from a neighbor,

or expand into virgin territory. The history of agriculture’s rapid spread

through Asia, Europe, and Africa shows that in many instances they chose

the last.

When Vere Gordon Childe was still teaching in Edinburgh and London,

most archaeologists were convinced that agriculture spread because it was

enthusiastically adopted by foragers who admired their well-fed farming

neighbors. There was, after all, plenty of evidence to show that our

evolutionary ancestors were just as excited by novelty as we are now, and

that good (and sometimes bad) ideas spread with surprising speed from one

relatively isolated population to the next. This kind of diffusion is almost

certainly why, for example, new techniques for flaking rocks into blades

and points often occur almost simultaneously in the architectural record in

many different places at once. Agriculture had also clearly spread this way

in some parts of the Americas.

Up until recently, the only reason to believe that agriculture might not

have spread this way was the fact that a handful of minor hunter-gatherer

populations, such as the BaMbuti in the Congo and the Hadzabe in

Tanzania, had continued to hunt and gather despite having been in contact

with farming societies for thousands of years. As with so many other

mysteries about the deep past, it is the busy algorithms set loose by the

paleogeneticists that have offered new insights into agriculture’s expansion.

And taken in conjunction with archaeological data and oral histories, the

story they tell in most cases is one of the displacement, replacement, and

even genocide of established hunter-gatherer populations by rapidly

growing populations of agriculturalists on the run from Malthusian traps.

Comparison of DNA extracted from the bones of Europe’s early

farmers11 with that of DNA extracted from the bones of Europe’s ancient

hunting and gathering populations shows that agriculture in Europe spread

courtesy of populations of farmers expanding into new lands, and in the

process displacing and eventually replacing established hunter-gatherer

populations12 rather than assimilating them. It also suggests that from

around 8,000 years ago the growing community of farmers expanded

beyond the Middle East into mainland Europe by way of Cyprus and the

Aegean Islands. A similar process occurred in Southeast Asia, where from

around 5,000 years ago rice-farming populations expanded inexorably from

the Yangtze River Basin, eventually colonizing much of Southeast Asia and

reaching the Malaysian Peninsula 3,000 years later.13 And in Africa, there is

now unambiguous genomic evidence of the sequential replacement of

nearly every indigenous forager population from East Africa to central and

southern Africa over the course of the last 2,000 years. This followed

Africa’s own agricultural revolution and the expansion of farming peoples

who established sequences of civilizations, kingdoms, and empires across

much of Africa.

When the Natufians started experimenting with agriculture, the global

human population was probably something in the region of 4 million

people. Twelve thousand years later, when the foundation stones of the

Industrial Revolution’s first fossil-fuel-powered factory were laid, the

population had grown to 782 million. Twelve thousand years ago nobody

farmed, but by the eighteenth century, only a barely significant percentage

of the global population still depended on foraging.

For all but a lucky few who lived in the handful of grand cities that

emerged to siphon energy from the countryside or who lorded it over hard-

working serfs, life was often a struggle. The rapid population growth

occurred in spite of declining life expectancies.

For subsistence farming societies, in other words, the “economic

problem” and scarcity was often a matter of life and death. And the only

obvious solution to it involved working harder and expanding into new

territory.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, despite the fact that hardly any of us now

produce our own food, that the sanctification of scarcity and the economic

institutions and norms that emerged during this period still underwrite how

we organize our economic life today.

TIME IS MONEY

Benjamin Franklin—founding father of the United States, intrepid flyer of

kites in thunderstorms, inventor of bifocals, the Franklin Stove, and the

urinary catheter—had a conflicted relationship with work. On the one hand,

he lamented that he was “the laziest person in the world” and quipped that

his inventions were nothing more than labor-saving devices intended to

spare him from future effort. Like John Maynard Keynes 150 years later, he

also believed that human ingenuity might spare future generations from a

life of hard labor.

“If every Man and Woman would work four Hours each Day on

something useful,” he enthused, “that Labor would produce sufficient to

procure all the Necessaries and Comforts of Life.”1

Yet on the other hand, courtesy of his fiercely Puritan upbringing,

Franklin was also of the view that idleness was a “Dead Sea that swallows

all virtues,”2 that all humans were born sinners, and that salvation was only

on offer to those who, through God’s grace, were both hard-working and

frugal. As a result, he took the view that it was incumbent on anyone

fortunate enough not to have to spend every waking hour procuring the

“necessaries and comforts of life” to find other useful, productive, and

purposeful things to do with their time.

To help him stick to the path of righteousness, Franklin always carried on

his person a list of thirteen “virtues” against which he logged his conduct

every day. Among the most hallowed of these was “industry,” which he

explained meant to “lose no time; be always employ’d in something

useful.”3 He also stuck to a strict daily routine that began every morning at

5 a.m. with the making of “a resolution” for the day, followed by blocks of

time allocated variously to work, meals, chores, and, toward the end of the

day, some form of enjoyable “distraction.” At 10 p.m. every night, he took a

few moments to reflect on the day’s achievements and give thanks to God

before putting himself to bed.

By 1748 Franklin, only aged forty-two, was well off enough to devote

the bulk of his time and energy to the kinds of work that satisfied his soul

rather than fattening his wallet: politics, making gadgets, scientific research,

and offering unsolicited advice to his friends. This was possible courtesy of

the steady income he earned through subscriptions to the Pennsylvania

Gazette, the newspaper he’d purchased two decades earlier, and the day-to-

day running of which was managed by his two slaves (who Franklin

eventually freed when in later life he finally and enthusiastically embraced

the abolitionist cause). During the course of that year, he took a little time

out to write a letter in which he offered some advice to a young

“tradesman” starting out in business.

“Remember that time is money,” Franklin said, before reminding the

young tradesman of money’s apparently organic powers to grow over time,

in the form of either interest on loans or assets accruing value. “Money can

beget Money,” he warned, “and its Offspring can beget more [but] whoever

kills a breeding sow destroys all her Offspring to the thousandth

Generation.”

Authorship of the phrase “time is money” is now often attributed to

Franklin, whose face stares from every hundred-dollar bill minted by the

United States Treasury. But it has a far more venerable provenance than

Franklin’s famous letter. The oldest recorded use of the phrase is in the

book Della Mercatura et del Mercante Perfetto (Commerce and the Perfect

Merchant), a tome published in 1573 by a Croatian trader, Benedetto

Cotrugli, who was also the first person anywhere to challenge readers with

a detailed description of the principles of double-entry bookkeeping. But

the sentiment behind this apparently self-evident idea is far older still, and

like our contemporary attitudes to work, also had its origins in farming.

The basic correspondence between time, effort, and reward is as intuitive

to a hunter-gatherer as it is to a packer in a warehouse sealing boxes on

minimum wage. Gathering firewood and wild fruits or hunting a porcupine

takes time and effort. And while hunters often found joy in the chase,

gatherers often viewed their work as no more spiritually rewarding than

most of us regard moving down the aisles of a supermarket. But there are

two critical differences between the immediate rewards accrued by a

hunter-gatherer for their work and that of a short-order chef flipping

burgers, or a stockbroker making a trade. The first is that where hunter-

gatherers enjoy the rewards of their labor immediately in the form of a meal

and the pleasure of feeding others, the warehouse packer only ever secures

the promise of future reward in the form of a token that can later be

exchanged for something useful or to pay off a debt. The second is that

while food was not always plentiful for foragers, time always was and so its

value was never accounted for in the granular vernacular of scarcity. To

foragers, in other words, time could not be “spent,” “budgeted,” “accrued,”

or “saved,” and while it was possible to squander an opportunity or waste

energy, time itself could not be “wasted.”

Much about the enigmatic circles of standing stones at Stonehenge,

Britain’s most iconic Neolithic monument, remains a puzzle for

archaeologists. They still argue with one another about how and why over a

period spanning a millennium and beginning roughly 5,100 years ago,

ancient Britons decided it was a good idea to drag up to ninety colossal

slabs of rock weighing as much as thirty tons from quarries as far away as

Wales’s Preseli Hills to what is now commuter-belt Wiltshire (about 150

miles). They also remain unsure how these ancient builders positioned the

heavy horizontal plinths atop the standing stones.

What is certain, though, is that the people who constructed this and

several other grand monuments that appeared over the course of the fourth

millennium BC in France, Corsica, Ireland, and Malta were the beneficiaries

of thousands of years of slowly improving agricultural productivity, and so

were among the first farmers to reliably generate sufficiently splendid

surpluses to abandon their fields for months at a time and expend a lot of

time and energy dragging huge rocks over mountains and valleys and then

assembling them into monumental structures.

What is also certain is that Stonehenge is a massive—albeit low-

resolution—calendar that was designed specifically to chart the ebb and

flow of the seasons and to mark the summer and winter solstices.

Stonehenge has this in common with many other examples of Neolithic

monumental architecture. But it is no surprise that the passage of the

seasons is such a common leitmotif in monuments built by farming

societies. Farming is above all about timing, and until the advent of climate-

controlled polytunnel agriculture all farmers lived at the mercy of the

seasons, and were hostage to a calendar determined by their crops and

livestock, and the regular passage of the earth around the sun. Most still are.

For cultivators who depend on annual crops, there are specific, often brief

windows of time to prepare the soil, to fertilize, to plant, to water, to weed,

to get rid of pests, to prune, and to harvest. Then there are specific windows

in which to bring in and process harvests and then store them, preserve

them, or get the produce to market before it spoils. The industrialization of

meat production means it is no longer always the case, but up until the

second half of the last century the seasons were also a similarly inflexible

master for most livestock farmers too. They have to align their working

lives to the reproductive and growth cycles of their livestock, which in turn

are aligned to those of the environments that feed them.

In all traditional farming societies, there were predictable periods in the

annual calendar where urgent work tailed off, even if, as was the case with

the work-obsessed followers of the Abrahamic religions, these holidays

sometimes had to be imposed by divine edict. In most farming societies,

regular work was either frowned upon or forbidden over the course of long

seasonal festivals. These periods were reserved for religious observance, for

making sacrifices, for finding love, for eating and drinking, and for

squabbling. In good years, they were an opportunity for people to celebrate

their industry and the generosity of their gods. In bad years, they were

moments of respite during which people drank to forget their troubles and

uttered muted thanks to their gods through gritted teeth.

In places like northern Europe and inland China, where the summers

were hot and winters bitterly cold, there were also seasons when the urgent

workload tailed off. But these were not time off from all work, just several

weeks of reprieve from urgent, time-sensitive tasks, and an opportunity to

do the equally necessary but less time-sensitive jobs like rebuilding a

dilapidated granary. In some places and in some years, these periods were

long enough for farmers to abandon their fields and pastures and come

together to drag massive boulders across the landscape and eventually build

grand monuments. In others, the time was needed to prepare for another

year of working the land. But outside of these windows, whenever work

urgently needed to be done, the consequences of not doing so were almost

always considerably greater for farmers than they were for foragers. The

Ju/’hoansi, for example, were often content to spontaneously take a day off

from foraging simply because they didn’t feel like it. Even if they were

hungry, they knew that putting off the food quest for a day would not have

any serious ramifications. For farmers, by contrast, taking a day off just

because they need a rest is rarely an option. Not doing an urgent job in a

timely fashion almost always incurs significant costs and creates additional

work. Failing to mend a broken fence could translate into days blundering

through the countryside in pursuit of lost sheep as well as time needed to

source materials and then mend the fence. Failing to irrigate a thirsty crop,

deal with pests, or remove weeds at the earliest possible opportunity might

be the difference between a good harvest, a poor harvest, and no harvest at

all. And failing to milk a cow whose udders were swollen with milk would

leave it uncomfortable at first, result in a possible infection, and, if left long

enough, would mean the cow would cease to produce milk again until it is

with calf.

But there was more to the relationship between time and work in early

agricultural societies than the tedious reality of being tied to an inflexible

seasonal cycle. One of the most profound legacies of the transition to

farming was to transform the way people experienced and understood time.

Foragers focused almost all of their attention on the present or immediate

future. They went foraging and hunting when they were hungry, and moved

camps when water points dried up or when food resources within easy

walking distance needed time to recover. They only thought of the distant

future when trying to imagine how a child might be when they were an

adult, what aches they might expect when they were old, or who among a

group of peers would live the longest. By having just a few wants that were

easily satisfied and living within societies where status seekers were

scorned, they were not hostage to outsized ambitions. They also saw no

substantive difference between their lives and those of their ancestors, and

typically considered their world to be more or less as it had always been. To

foragers, change was immanent in the environment—it happened all the

time, when the wind blew, the rain fell, or an elephant cleared a new path.

But change was always constrained by a deeper sense of confidence in the

continuity and predictability of the world around them. Every season was

different from those that preceded it, yet these differences always fell within

a range of predictable changes. Thus for the Ju/’hoansi, when they were still

free to forage as their ancestors had, carrying the weight of history was as

inconvenient as carrying a house around, and abandoning the deep past

freed them to engage with the world around them unencumbered by ancient

precedents or future ambitions. For this reason, the Ju/’hoansi also didn’t

care about or spend time calculating genealogical lineages, invoke the

names and achievements of their ancestors, or relive past catastrophes,

droughts, or heroic deeds. Indeed, once mourned, the dead were forgotten

within a generation or two and their burial sites left abandoned and

unvisited.

To produce food requires that you live at once in the past, present, and

future. Almost every task on a farm is focused on achieving a future goal or

managing a future risk based on past experience. A cultivator will clear

land, prepare soils, plow, dig irrigation ditches, sow seeds, weed, prune, and

nurture their crop so that, all being well, when the seasons change they will

at the very least bring in a harvest adequate to support them through the

next seasonal cycle, and provide sufficient seed stock for them to plant the

following year. Some jobs are, of course, taken with an even longer view on

the future. The early farmers in Britain who built Stonehenge did so with a

view to it lasting for years if not generations. And when a farmer took a

cow to stud, he did so in the hope that in forty weeks or so it would bear a

calf that, if looked after well, would not only produce milk but also more

calves and so form part of an ever-expanding herd before finally ending its

life on the butcher’s block.

But to focus most of your effort working for future rewards is also to

dwellFor much of the nineteenth and early t in a universe of endless

possibilities—some good, some hard to call, and many bad. So when

farmers imagined overflowing granaries, fresh-baked bread, meat curing in

the shed, new-laid eggs on the table, and baskets of fresh fruit and

vegetables ready to be eaten or preserved, these same cheerful visions

simultaneously invoked images of droughts and floods, rats and weevils

battling it out over the moldy remains of anemic harvests, disease-ridden

livestock being hounded by predators, weed-infested vegetable gardens, and

orchards producing rotten fruit.

Where foragers stoically accepted occasional hardships, farmers

persuaded themselves that things could always be better if they worked a

little harder. Farmers who put in the extra hours would, over time, usually

do better than lazier ones who only ever made contingency for the one or

two risks they considered to be the most likely. Thus among the Ju/’hoansi’s

farming neighbors along the Kavango River the wealthiest ones were

usually the most risk-averse—those who worked hardest to build good

enclosures to protect their cattle and goats from predators at night; who

spent long summer days diligently chasing birds, monkeys, and others

drawn to their fields; who planted their seeds a little deeper; who went to

the trouble of dragging bucketloads of water from the river to irrigate their

crops just in case, as occasionally happened, the rains arrived late.

In much the same way that cooks use fire to transform raw ingredients into

food or blacksmiths use their forges to work iron into tools, farmers use

their labor to transform wild forests into pastures and barren land into

productive fields, gardens, and orchards. In other words, farmers work to

transform wild natural spaces into domestic cultural ones.

Foragers, by contrast, did not distinguish between nature and culture, or

between the wild and the tame. At least not in the same straightforward way

that farming peoples and those of us who live in cities do now. In Ju/’hoan,

for instance, there are no words that one can translate straightforwardly as

either “nature” or “culture.” As far as they were concerned they were as

much part of the landscape—“the earth’s face,” as they called it—as all the

other creatures, and it was the responsibility of the gods to render it

productive.

To farm you have to set yourself apart from your environment and

assume some of the responsibilities once exclusively performed by the

gods, because to a farmer an environment is only ever potentially

productive and has to be worked to be rendered productive. Thus farming

societies routinely divided the landscape around them into cultural and

natural spaces. Spaces that they successfully rendered productive through

their labor, such as farmhouses, yards, granaries, barns, villages, gardens,

pastures, and fields, were domesticated, cultural spaces, whereas those

outside of their immediate control they considered wild, natural spaces.

And, critically, the boundaries between these spaces were often demarcated

by fences, gates, walls, ditches, and hedgerows. Similarly, animals that

lived under their control were domesticated, whereas those that roamed free

were “wild.” Importantly, though, farmers were always acutely aware that

for any space to remain domesticated constant work was required. Fields

that were left untended were soon reclaimed by weeds; structures that were

not properly maintained soon fell into disrepair; and animals that were left

unsupervised either went feral or perished, often as a result of predation by

wild creatures. And while farmers recognized that their livelihoods

depended on their ability to harness natural forces and operate within

natural cycles, they also took the view that wherever nature intruded

unbidden into domesticated spaces it became a pest. Unwanted plants

growing in a plowed field were declared weeds and unwanted animals were

declared vermin.

By investing labor into their land to produce the “necessaries of life,”

farmers saw their relationships with their environments in far more

transactional terms than foragers ever did. Where foragers’ provident

environments shared unconditionally with them and they, in turn, shared

with others, farmers saw themselves as exchanging their labor with the

environment for the promise of future food. In a sense, they considered the

work they did to make land productive to mean that the land owed them a

harvest and in effect was in their debt.

Unsurprisingly, farmers tended to extend the labor/debt relationship they

had with their land to their relationships with each other. They shared with

one another, but beyond the immediate household or a core group of kin,

sharing was framed as an exchange, even if an uneven one. In farming

societies, there was no such thing as a free lunch. Everyone was expected to

work.

Adam Smith wasn’t sure whether the urge we have “to truck, barter, and

exchange” stuff with one another was a result of our acquisitive nature or

whether it was a by-product of our intelligence—what he called the

“necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech.” But he was

sure that our appreciation for the art of the deal was one of the things that

distinguished us most clearly from other species.

“Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one

bone for another with another dog,” he explained.4

He was also convinced that money’s primary function was to facilitate

trade and that money was invented to replace primitive systems of barter.

While he was the most thorough in making the case that money evolved

from primitive barter, he was by no means the first. Plato, Aristotle,

Thomas Aquinas, and many others had already offered similar arguments to

account for the origins of money.

It is no surprise that Adam Smith believed that the origins of money lay

in trade and that its primary function was to aid people’s efforts to exchange

things with one another. The windswept town of Kirkcaldy on Scotland’s

Fife coast, where Adam Smith grew up with his widowed mother, is now a

monument to the decline in Scotland’s manufacturing industries. But for the

duration of Smith’s childhood it was a bustling port town filled with

merchants and mongers. It had a busy market and a thriving textile industry,

and Smith spent his early life watching a near-ceaseless procession of three-

masted merchantmen cutting across the black-green waters of the North

Sea, coming to deposit cargoes of flax, wheat, continental beer, and hemp at

the harbor, before disembarking again with holds stuffed with coal and salt,

or decks piled with bales of linen.

An aging Adam Smith returned to his childhood home, after several

decades studying and teaching in Cambridge, Glasgow, and Europe, to

write his most celebrated work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of

the Wealth of Nations, which he published in 1776. Influenced by the

“physiocrats”—a French intellectual movement that, among other things,

lobbied for idle aristocrats to shoulder a greater proportion of the king’s

extravagant tax demands, and who believed that neither governments nor

nobles should meddle in the natural order of the markets—Smith was

convinced that reason could reveal the fundamental laws of human

economic behavior in the same way that Isaac Newton had used reason to

reveal some of the fundamental laws that governed the movement of

celestial bodies.

The Wealth of Nations has a biblical quality to it, not least because Smith

had a particular genius for presenting complex ideas in the form of neat

parables similar in structure to those that were issued from church pulpits

across the land every Sunday.

His most often quoted parable deals with the “division of labor.” It tells

the story of a tribe of “savage” hunters—for which he drew inspiration from

stories of Native Americans—each of whom fends only for themselves and

their immediate dependants. But then one of the hunters discovers that he

has a particular talent for making bows and arrows and so starts making

them for others in exchange for venison. Before long he realizes that by

staying home and making bows he ends up with more venison to eat than he

could ever acquire as a hunter. Not being a fan of the chase, he gives up

hunting altogether and specializes as an “armorer,” a line of work that keeps

him well fed and satisfied. Inspired by his example, other “savages” decide

that specialization is the way of the future. Soon one hangs up his bow to

become a carpenter, another a blacksmith, and another a tanner, with the

result that this once inefficient village of hunters, in which everyone was a

jack of all trades and duplicated the work done by others, is transformed

into a highly efficient community of skilled professionals all of whom

cheerfully barter the products of their labor for the products of others’.

“Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a

merchant,” Smith concludes, “and the society itself grows to be what is

properly a commercial society.”5

But as Smith noted, barter economies are struck by a single simple

problem. What happens when the hunter wants the carpenter to make him a

new bow and the carpenter is sick and tired of eating meat but is really

desperate for a new chisel from the blacksmith? The solution, Smith argued,

lay in their agreeing on a “common instrument of commerce”—what

economic historians now often call “primitive currency”—in the form of

“one commodity or the other,” whether it be cattle, salt, nails, sugar, or, as

would ultimately become the case, gold, silver, and coinage.

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was believed

that Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith had been friends, and that Franklin

had offered Smith the benefit of his thoughts on an early draft of An Inquiry

into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The appeal of this tale

of Enlightenment collaboration stemmed principally from the fact that the

publication of Wealth of Nations in 1776 not only coincided with the United

States wresting its independence from the British Crown, but also because it

could be read as a velvet-gloved critique of the tariffs, taxes, and customs

duties that inspired North American colonists to cast off the shackles of

British imperial rule in the first place. But even more than this, the Wealth

of Nations articulated the entrepreneurial spirit of free enterprise that

America later co-opted as the central narrative of its success.

It turns out that the transatlantic friendship between these two titans of

the Enlightenment was fake news. Franklin and Smith shared some mutual

friends and had read many of the same books. They may also have met one

another socially during the period when Franklin served as the

representative for Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to the British Crown in

London during the 1770s. But there is nothing to suggest that their

intellectual exchanges extended beyond Adam Smith purchasing a copy of

the book in which Franklin described his experiments with electricity.6

Had the tale of their friendship not been a fantasy, then it is possible that

the parable may have taken a different form. Because even though Franklin

also believed that money must have been invented to overcome the

inconveniences of barter, his experiences negotiating treaties with the

“Indians” from Iroquois Confederacy7 suggested to him that “savages” like

them were not interested in trading to accumulate wealth. He believed that

they had other priorities, which gave him cause to question some of his

own.

“Our laborious manner of life . . . they esteem slavish and base,” Franklin

observed of his Indian neighbors, and noted that while he and his fellow

colonists were hostage to “infinite Artificial wants, no less craving than

those of Nature” that were often “difficult to satisfy,” the Indians had only

“few . . . wants,” all of which were easily met by “the spontaneous

productions of nature with the addition of very little labor, if hunting and

fishing may indeed be called labor when Game is so plenty.” As a result,

compared to the colonists, Franklin noted somewhat enviously, the Indians

enjoyed an “abundance of leisure,”8 which, in happy accordance with his

views that idleness was a vice, they used for debate, reflection, and refining

their oratorical skills.

As the anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, Adam Smith’s

parable of the entrepreneurial savages has become “the founding myth of

our system of economic relations”9 and is retold uncritically in pretty much

every introductory academic textbook. The problem is that it has no basis in

fact. When Caroline Humphrey, a Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge,

conducted an exhaustive review of the ethnographic and historical literature

looking for societies that had barter systems like those described by Smith,

she eventually gave up and concluded “no example of a barter economy,

pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of

money,” and that “all available ethnography suggests that there never has

been such a thing.”10

The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy Franklin wrote about (and

whom it is thought Smith had in mind when imagining his “savage”

entrepreneurs) had a clear division of labor based on gender, age, and

inclination. Individuals specialized in tasks like growing, harvesting, and

processing maize, beans, and squash; hunting and trapping; weaving; house

building; and the manufacture of tools. But they didn’t barter or trade the

products of their efforts among one another. Instead they held most

resources communally in grand “longhouses” and afforded responsibility

for their distribution to councils of women. They did, however, make

elaborate ritual exchanges with their neighbors. But these exchanges

resembled neither the free-wheeling barter of Smith’s imagination nor the

primitive currency-based transactions that Smith insisted logically followed

the division of labor. More than anything, they involved trade in symbolic

objects and served the principal goal of purchasing peace by satisfying

moral debts, like those that arose when young men from one tribe

encountered and killed a young man from another.

Economists often develop tin ears when people in other fields raise

awkward questions about the fundamental assumptions of their discipline.

Even so, it is increasingly hard for them to ignore the now overwhelming

evidence that while money may be used principally as “store of value” and

a medium of exchange, its origins do not lie in barter, but rather in the credit

and debt arrangements that arose between farmers—who were, in effect,

waiting for their land to pay them for the labor they invested in it and the

people who depended on their surpluses.

Around the same time that ancient Britons were busy dragging massive

boulders from Wales to Wiltshire, the first agricultural states with kings,

bureaucrats, priests, and armies began to emerge in the Middle East and in

North Africa. These states had their roots in the rich alluvial soils of the

Euphrates, Tigris, and later Nile River valleys.

The earliest Mesopotamian city-states, like Uruk, were almost certainly

the first societies in which farmers were productive enough to sustain

significant urban populations who didn’t want or need to muddy their feet

digging in the fields. These were also the first places for which there is solid

evidence for money in the form of inscribed clay ledgers. And while this

currency was enumerated in silver and grain, it rarely changed hands in

physical form. Many transactions took the form of IOUs that were logged

by temple accountants, so enabling value to exchange hands virtually, in

much the same way that occurs now in the near-cashless cities of the digital

world.

People in these city-states made exchanges based on credit for the same

reasons that ancient farming societies liked to build monumental

timepieces. Farmers’ lives were subject to the agricultural calendar, and

operated on the basis of the expectation of predictable harvests in late

summer that would sustain them through the course of the year. Thus over

the course of the year when farmers took credit from beer-brewers,

merchants, and temple officials, they were in effect simply transferring

onward the debts owed them by their land. And because economic activity

was almost all based on delayed returns, this meant that everybody else

operated on the basis of credit, with debts only ever being temporarily

settled up when harvests were brought in.

In other words, foragers with immediate-return economies saw their

relationships with one another as an extension of the relationship they had

with the environments that shared food with them, and farmers with their

delayed-return economies saw their relationships with one another as an

extension of their relationship with the land that demanded work from

them.

Benjamin Franklin’s view that “time is money” also reflected his belief that

diligent effort always merited some reward. Trade is “nothing else but the

exchange of labor for labor,” he explained, and as a result “the value of all

things is . . . most justly measured by labor.”11

The message that hard work creates value is drip-fed or beaten into

children almost everywhere in the hope of instilling a good work ethic in

them. Even so, there is little obvious correspondence today between time

worked and monetary reward in the world’s largest economies, beyond the

now almost quaint convention that the very highest earners tend to take the

majority of their income annually in the form of dividends and bonuses,

medium and high earners take theirs monthly, and lower earners tend to be

paid hourly. After all, economists insist that value is ultimately apportioned

by markets and that “supply and demand” only sometimes corresponds

neatly with labor effort.

The correspondence between labor effort and monetary reward wasn’t

always so out of kilter. Before the fossil-fuel-energy revolution, almost

everyone apart from a handful of aristocrats, wealthy merchants, generals,

and priests believed that there was a clear, organic correspondence between

labor effort and reward. Unsurprisingly, the broad principle that work

creates value features prominently in classical European, Middle Eastern,

Indian, medieval Christian, and Confucian philosophy and theology.

Ancient Greek philosophers, for instance, may have been contemptuous of

hard manual labor but they still acknowledged its fundamental importance,

even if they had slaves to do it for them. The same principle is also

discussed in the writings of thirteenth-century scholars like Thomas

Aquinas—who insisted that any commodity’s value should “increase in

relation to the amount of labor which has been expended in the

improvement” of it.12

When Adam Smith returned to Kirkcaldy to write the Wealth of Nations,

this idea still retained a kind of primal currency across Western Europe,

where more than half of the population still made a living as small-scale

farmers and so saw an obvious correspondence between how hard they

worked and how well they ate.

Smith was well aware that most people felt there was an organic link

between labor and value. But he also noted that when it came to the buying

and selling of things, value was established by what price people were

prepared to pay rather than the value the manufacturer placed on his wares.

Thus in his view the labor value of a bow or anything else was established

not by the amount of work that went into making it but by the amount of

work the purchaser was prepared to do in order to acquire it.

The two best known of the many other versions of the labor theory of

value come from Adam Smith’s near contemporary, the economist David

Ricardo, and, most famously of all, Karl Marx. Ricardo’s version was an

elaborate riff on Franklin’s. He argued that the labor value of any object

needed to incorporate the total effort required to make it. This meant it had

to take into account the effort put in to source the materials and the effort

involved in the manufacture of the item, as well as the labor that went into

acquiring the skills and making the tools necessary to manufacture the

good. Thus, he argued, the labor value of a good made by a highly

accomplished and expensively tooled artisan in an hour might be equivalent

in value to the work of an unskilled laborer digging a ditch over the course

of a week.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the extent to which Marxism would later be

viewed as the embodiment of everything un-American, Karl Marx was a

great admirer of the United States’ Founding Fathers, none more so than

Benjamin Franklin, whose name is invoked approvingly in many sections of

Das Kapital. He also credits “the celebrated Franklin” for setting him on the

course to developing his own version of the labor theory of value, which he

called “the law of value” and which is a considerably more convoluted and

complex creature than the versions proposed by Adam Smith or David

Ricardo. It also served a different purpose. Beyond the fact that Marx

wanted to reestablish labor as a just arbiter of value, he developed his law

of value specifically to demonstrate how capitalists were able to generate

profit by forcing their workers to create more value in the workplace than

the wages they were paid, and so expose what he believed was one of the

fundamental contradictions that would, in time, lead to the inevitable

collapse of capitalism. And he did this with a view to exposing how under

capitalism the “exchange value” of any good had become untethered from

its “use-value”—the fundamental human need a product, like a pair of

shoes, actually fulfills.

The idea that “money might beget money” in the form of interest, or that

money might be “put to work” through being invested so that it can

generate returns, is now so familiar to most of us that it feels almost as

intuitive as the relationship between time, effort, and reward. To foragers

like the Ju/’hoansi and others still trying to figure out the basics of the

monetized economy, this idea is anything but intuitive. To them it seems

ridiculous. As ridiculous as their insistence that the death of an elephant or

the birth of a child can change the weather sounds to the state officials and

others charged with bringing economic development to them.

Where foragers like the Ju/’hoansi find the idea that money might beget

money bizarre, their cattle-herding neighbors living on the better-watered

fringes of the Kalahari do not. They are descended from the sophisticated

agricultural societies who spread across southern, central, and eastern

Africa in the second millennium, but who did not historically use money,

aggregate in large cities, or care a great deal about trucking and trading and

bartering one thing or another. They did care about wealth, influence, and

power, though, and measured status according to the numbers and quality of

the cattle they owned, and the number of wives they had.

Unlike gold or silver, wealth in the form of a well-managed herd will

always grow. While most cattle are now herded into slaughterhouses before

they reach two years of age, the full natural lifespan of the lucky few cattle

offered a natural retirement these days is typically between eighteen and

twenty-two years. And for a good proportion of this time they remain

reproductive. Thus over a full lifespan an average cow might be expected to

produce between six and eight calves and a prize bull might sire hundreds.

In other words, like any investment-grade asset, as long as farmers don’t do

anything to destroy their capital and have space to run their herds, they can

expect to see their capital beget capital because their cattle beget cattle.

Unsurprisingly, in almost every pastoralist society, the loan of livestock

usually incurs some form of interest, and the expectation that not only will

the animal loaned be returned, or one similar to it, but also a proportion of

the offspring it produces under the other person’s care.

While they typically were not as obsessed with cattle as the highly

mobile African civilizations were, European, Middle Eastern, and Southeast

Asian farming societies were similarly influenced by the reproductive

capacities of livestock when it came to thinking about how wealth might

spontaneously reproduce. It is no coincidence then that the roots of much of

the financial lexicon in European languages—words like capital and stock

—have their roots in livestock farming. The word “capital,” for instance,

stems from the Latin root of capitalis, which in turn comes from the Proto-

Indo-European word kaput, meaning head, which to this day remains the

principal term used when denominating livestock. The word “fee” likewise

is an elaboration on the old Proto-Germanic and Gothic word for cattle—

feoh—just as the word “pecuniary” and currencies like the peso have their

roots in the Latin term pecu, meaning cattle or flock, which itself is thought

to share similar origins to the Sanskrit term pasu, which also refers to cattle.

But in these societies, most of which were more dependent on large-scale

cultivation than the consumption of animal products, the value of cattle

especially lay not in their meat or even their milk. Instead it lay in the

physical work they did, pulling plows and other heavy loads for people.

And because they were valuable in this way, they begot value not only by

making calves but also through the work they did. And in this respect at

least they were not so different from the machines we depend on now.

THE FIRST MACHINES

When the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley first imagined Dr. Victor

Frankenstein fleeing the monster that he had designed and brought to life,

her ambition was to come up with a “ghost story” to frighten her husband,

the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and clever enough to impress the

controversy-courting ego-in-chief of the Romantic movement, Lord Byron,

with whom they were holidaying in Switzerland in the rainy summer of

1816. But in creating the story of Dr. Frankenstein’s “unnatural” ambitions

made flesh, she created a parable of the dangers of progress and a larger-

than-life symbol of disruptive technologies, like artificial intelligence,

poised to punish their creators for their hubris.1

It was no coincidence that Dr. Frankenstein’s artificially intelligent

monster was the child of “godlike science,” “mechanics,” and the “working

of some powerful engine.” Four years previously, other powerful engines,

this time in the north of England, had sparked an “insurrectional state” that

the Leeds Mercury declared had “no parallel in history since the troubled

days of King Charles I.” The insurrectionists were the “Luddites,” a group

whose name would become as enduring as Mary Shelley’s fable and who

counted her traveling companion Lord Byron among their few celebrity

supporters. The objects of the Luddites’ rage were the stationary steam

engines, the automated spinning and weaving machines they powered, and

the men who owned them who collectively were strangling the life out of

the north of England’s once thriving cottage-based textile industry.

The Luddites named their movement after Ned Ludd, a troublesome

young apprentice in a cotton mill who, one day in 1779, according to

legend, grabbed a mallet and pounded two stocking frames into matchsticks

in a fit of anger. After this incident, it became customary for anyone who

accidentally damaged any machinery in a mill or factory in the course of

their work to proclaim their innocence and deadpan that “Ned Ludd did it.”

At first the Luddites were content to channel the ghost of their namesake.

They would smash some cotton frames with mallets and return home

content that a strong message had been sent. But, frustrated by mill owners

who knew all too well that their engines bestowed upon them both

economic and political influence that surpassed even that held by all but the

most established hereditary nobles, the Luddites eventually resorted to

systematic sabotage, arson, and assassination. This escalation marked the

beginning of the end of the movement. In 1817, Parliament promptly

declared machine-smashing a capital crime and dispatched 12,000 troops to

the troubled regions. With those Luddites caught and convicted of their

crimes either sent to penal colonies or sentenced to the gallows, the

rebellion came to an abrupt end.

Luddism is now a shorthand for technophobia, but the Luddites didn’t

think of themselves that way. Their movement’s aim was twofold. Firstly,

they wanted to protect the livelihoods and lifestyles of the skilled artisans

who could no longer compete with clever machines, and secondly, they

wanted to alleviate the dismal conditions under which the ever-expanding

numbers of people who had no option but to work in the mills labored. In

the first they were singularly unsuccessful, but in the second they made a

lasting impact. It would not take long before Luddism would morph into the

labor movements that so dramatically shaped political life in Western

Europe and beyond over the course of the next two centuries.

Ever since its publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s fable has resonated

with new generations of readers who have had to adjust their lives to

accommodate successive waves of ever more transformative, wondrous,

and occasionally terrifying technologies. If nearly two centuries after it first

emerged from Mary Shelley’s imagination, Frankenstein’s monster now

appears to have finally come of age, it is because it embodies our fears

about robotics and artificial intelligence. But when viewed from the

perspective of a deep history of work, our anxieties about artificially

intelligent machines turning on their owners are not without precedent. For

as contemporary as Shelley’s fable is, it is one that would also have

resonated in some ways with Roman senators and plebeians alike during the

reigns of the Caesars, sugar and cotton plantation owners in the Caribbean

and southern states of the USA, nobles in Shang Dynasty China, ancient

Sumerians, Mayans, and Aztecs. Indeed, it would have resonated with any

and all societies who rationalized slavery by dehumanizing those they

enslaved.

Were Dr. Frankenstein to build a similar monster today, its cognitive

circuits would be designed to emulate the plasticity, creativity, and lateral-

thinking capabilities characteristic of human thought. And even though

reanimating dead human flesh is not yet on the cards, its robotic body

would almost certainly resemble that of a human or other animal. In the

restless world of robotics, engineers building the most versatile and

dextrous autonomous systems are looking ever more to the natural world

for inspiration. New drone technologies mimic the flight mechanisms of

wasps, hummingbirds, and bees; new submersibles mimic sharks, dolphins,

squid, and rays; and among the most dextrous, agile, and superficially least

threatening robots are those that mimic dogs.

For now, the only mass-marketed home robot capable of doing anything

more interesting than vacuuming floors is Sony’s Aibo puppy. The 2018

version of Sony’s $3,000 digital pet shimmers with life compared to its

well-publicized, clunky ancestor, who was first manufactured in 1999. But

its arthritic movements mean that even the newest version is quickly

abandoned whenever a real puppy shows up.

Its shortcomings notwithstanding, there is a symmetry to the fact that

Sony’s puppy may in time prove to be the first widely used domestic robot,

because the story of our species’ reliance on autonomously intelligent

beings harks back beyond 20,000 years ago to the first tentative

relationships forged between people and flesh-and-bone puppies.

In 1914, laborers digging ditches in Oberkassel, a suburb on the outskirts of

Bonn in Germany, unearthed an ancient grave in which they found the

decomposed remains of a man and woman lying buried among a modest

collection of antler and bone ornaments. These have since been dated to

around 14,700 years ago. They also found what were later revealed to be

the bones of a twenty-eight-week-old puppy. Osteological analysis of its

bones and teeth shows that a couple of months before its death the puppy

had contracted canine distemper virus, a disease still fatal to nearly half the

domestic dogs that contract it.2

Apart from the fact that this puppy is the oldest irrefutable evidence of

domestication anywhere,3 what was most remarkable about this grave is the

fact that the dog would not have lived as long as it did after contracting

canine distemper without being cared for by humans. In other words, this

particular puppy was not much good for work, but its owners nevertheless

spent energy caring for it when it was ill.

The busy genomic algorithms have added layers of detail and confusion

to the story of our species’ long relationship with dogs. In 2016, researchers

at the University of Oxford announced that their analyses of both ancient

and modern dog bones, and genomic material, supported the idea that dogs

were domesticated independently twice.4 The following year another team

announced that their data, based this time on the detailed analysis of the

genomes of a larger set of dog bones from Germany, suggest that

domestication probably only happened once and that it occurred sometime

between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago.5 And while some ancient

mitochondrial DNA indicates dog domestication occurred first in Europe,

analyses of mitochondrial and genomic data from modern dogs have

indicated East Asia, the Middle East, and central Asia as centers for

domestication too.

The Oberkassel Puppy meets Aibo

The fact that dogs were domesticated long before any other creatures and

still share the closest partnership with humans is a reminder that while most

domestic animals are now food, for much of the history of domestication

the primary job of most domestic animals was to do work, and through the

intimacy of that work the relationship was sometimes transformed into one

of mutual loyalty and even love.

Fifteen millennia ago, when the partnership between humans and dogs

began to evolve into something more special than neighborliness, humans

and domesticated animals comprised a barely measurable fraction of a

percent of the total mammalian biomass on earth. Since then, however,

humans and their domesticated animals have increased the total volume of

mammalian biomass on earth by a factor of roughly four, courtesy of

agriculture’s ability to transform other forms of biomass into living flesh.

As a result of this and the appropriation of other mammalian habitats for

agriculture and human settlement, people and their domestic animals now

comprise a remarkable 96 percent of all mammalian biomass on the planet.

Humans account for 36 percent of that total, and the livestock that we

nurture, nourish, and then send to the slaughterhouse—mainly in the form

of cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats—account for 60 percent. The remaining 4

percent are the ever-diminishing populations of wild animals who now

cower in our hedgerows, pose for tourists, and dodge poachers in our nature

reserves, national parks, and a dwindling number of wild refuges. Wild

avifauna have not fared that much better. With around 66 billion chickens

being produced and destroyed for human consumption every year, the total

living biomass of domesticated fowl at any one time is estimated to now be

triple that of wild birds.6

Timeline indicating estimated dates and location of major animal domestications

Domestic animals also played a vital role in determining which

agricultural societies captured the most energy, grew the fastest, and

supported the largest human populations. They did this firstly through

consuming plants that were not palatable to people and converting that

energy into fertilizer (and meat), and secondly by using their muscle power

to pull plows, drag tree trunks, carry people, and distribute surpluses. While

the value of a living steer is now less than the sum of its parts in the form of

meat, leather, and other animal products once it has reached optimum

slaughter weight, up until the Industrial Revolution cattle almost

everywhere were worth more alive than dead, as long as they could drag a

plow.

10,000-year-old skeleton of a 2,200 lb, six-foot-tall auroch recovered from Vig in Denmark in 1905

Over the course of the 12,000 years since the Natufians first started to

experiment with managing wild strands of wheat, there were remarkably

few technological innovations that dramatically expanded the quantities of

energy individuals were able to capture and put to work. Wheels, pulleys,

and levers all made a big difference. So did technologies associated with

metalwork that helped people produce stronger, more precisely made, and

enduring tools. But up until the invention of waterwheels in the third

century BC and windmills in Roman Egypt in the first century AD, by far the

most important new sources of non-food energy were the animals, like

llamas, camels, donkeys, oxen, Asiatic elephants, and horses, who were

forced into human service, and who until the invention of the steam and

later internal combustion engine were our primary non-human source of

motive power.

It is not clear how each of the individual species that are now thoroughly

domesticated were brought into the human fold. It is generally accepted that

a variety of pathways were followed, some of which did not, at first,

involve either bribery or beatings. Pigs, like domestic cats and dogs, may

have gradually infiltrated their way into the human world by loitering

around their settlements in search of food scraps, or as a result of being

captured by hunters to fatten them up.

Besides dogs, the oldest animal domesticates were probably sheep and

goats. These appear in the archaeological record in the Middle East from

around the same period that domesticated wheat does. It may well be that

this first domestication of herbivores was achieved with the assistance of

dogs, because the same genes that made wild goats and sheep sociable and

inclined to assemble in herds also made these animals responsive to being

herded by dogs snapping at their fetlocks.

Sheep and goats are tasty and have rich fat. They also produce milk and

in some cases wool, but they are not much use when it comes to doing

actual work. The most transformative of all animal domestications were

almost certainly the five species of cattle beginning 10,500 years ago. Most

domestic cattle are descended from aurochs, the long-legged, big-horned

mega-cattle that roamed in vast herds across Europe, North Africa, and

central Asia. They were domesticated first in the Middle East around

10,500 years ago, then again independently in India 6,000 years ago, and

possibly yet again a couple of thousand years later in Africa. Among the

other domestications of cattle species, like the yak and the banteng, the

most important was the swamp buffalo. This was domesticated around

4,000 years ago. It is thought to be one of the few species that was subject

to a targeted domestication specifically to do work, because the old

evidence for its domestication coincides broadly with the intensification of

rice production in Southeast Asia, as laborious hoeing was replaced by deep

furrow plowing.

If the eastern, central, and southern African “cattle cultures” saw their

cattle as symbols of wealth and power, in the first agricultural states cattle

were thought of more as pathways to wealth and power, because when it

came to heavy-duty tasks like plowing, a single good ox could do the work

of five burly men. In other words, the domestication of cattle was important

not because it provided people with protein, but rather because it enabled

the greater intensification of grain farming and a means to transport these

surpluses from the country to the city. And what’s more, they did so mainly

by capturing and converting energy from plants that humans couldn’t eat,

and through their labor, manure, and in the final instance their flesh,

converting those into forms that humans could eat.

The eventual demotion of cattle from hallowed and respected work-

partner to food in many places was accelerated by the domestication of

another big, docile, and easily trainable herbivore: the horse. Horses were

not only far more amenable to carrying people over long distances much

more speedily than cattle could, but a big cart horse could do twice the

work of a big ox and had the added benefit of working 30–50 percent

faster.7 The only places where cattle were safe from demotion by horses

were the tropics, where humpback cattle coped better with heat than horses

and where water buffalo were especially well adapted to wading through

muddy paddy fields and resisting tropical pathogens.

In 1618, at the age of twenty-two, René Descartes signed up to fight for the

Protestant Prince of Nassau’s army during the exploratory skirmishes of

what would later be remembered as the Thirty Years’ War. More of a wonk

than a bully boy, he was assigned to work with the military engineers,

focusing his energies on solving mathematical problems, like calculating

the trajectories of cannonballs and the number of horses the army required.

Light and heavy cavalry often played a decisive role in battles, but they

were no more important than the herds of cart horses that dragged cannons,

tents, food wagons, gunpowder, smiths’ forges, ammunition, siege engines,

and other material from place to place, or the ponies that carried spies and

messengers. It was during one of these maneuvers in 1619 near Neuberg in

Germany that Descartes had his famous “night of visions”—a sequence of

dreams that persuaded him that his ability to reason was sufficient proof of

his own existence, giving rise to the now famous dictum, cogito, ergo sum

—I think, therefore I am. It also persuaded him that the human body was no

more than “a statue or machine made of earth,” and animals, like the

warhorses that sustained his army, lacked the faculty for reason and so were

nothing more than elaborate barley- and oat-fueled automata.8

Of course Descartes was not the first philosopher to imagine the animal

world as a vast collection of Sony Aibos packed into different, organic,

robot bodies. The idea that animals are biological automata echoed prior

theological and philosophical arguments that suggested that human bodies

alone were animated by souls, whereas animals merely existed.

Almost all societies that depended on hunting for meat considered

animals to have souls of a sort, even if they weren’t always exactly the

same as human souls. Many also considered the fact that hunters were in

effect harvesters of souls to be morally troubling and came up with a

different way to rationalize the killing. This is why for instance Inuit and

Siberian foragers like the Yukhagir insisted that the animals they hunted

often gifted themselves to humans for food and other animal products,

while hunters like the Ju/’hoansi took the view that most of the animals they

pursued were complex thinking creatures and so also afforded them the

dignity of a soul or at least, as the Ju/’hoansi put it, a kind of life force.

For farmers involved in meat production or butchers, there is little room

for the intimacy that comes from hunting an animal on foot with a spear or

bow. The emotional weight of animals’ souls would be too great a burden to

bear. Humans, though, have evolved the ability to be selective in deploying

the empathy that underwrites our social natures. Fortunately for workers in

large slaughterhouses, denying empathy is relatively easy to do because,

unlike hunters who often saw their prey at their magnificent best, butchers

often see livestock at their diminished worst, inhaling the smells of death

while standing in pens outside the slaughterhouse.

Even so, farming societies adopted a variety of different approaches to

dealing with the ethical problem of killing animals. Some simply chose to

hide the messy business. This is the approach we take in many cities now,

where living animals are transformed into chops, kebabs, and burgers by

butchers who work far from the public gaze. This out-of-sight-out-of-mind

approach was the one often taken in places where theological and

philosophical traditions did not dispose of the idea of animals having souls.

Thus, for example, in the Hindu tradition, in which animals are thought to

have diminished versions of human souls, the slaughter and preparation of

meat and animal products was delegated to members of lower castes like

the Chamar, the leather workers, and Khatiks, the butchers, whose

neighborhoods and workplaces were studiously avoided by members of

higher, purer castes who did not wish to soil themselves with the blood of

animals.

Another option was regulation. This too is a characteristic of many

modern industrial societies where a host of rules and directives on animal

welfare govern the rearing and eventual slaughter of animals. This is the

approach taken by followers of Abrahamic religions. Thus traditional

Judaism holds that it is an offense against God to sever a limb from a live

animal and then eat it (Genesis 9:4); that slaughter must always involve the

swift cutting of the throat to spare the animal suffering; that cows and their

calves should never be killed on the same day; that the meat of a kid should

never be served in its mother’s milk (Leviticus 22:28 and Deuteronomy

14:21); that working cattle (like people) are entitled to a day of rest on the

Sabbath (Exodus 20:10, 23:12); and that people must always ensure that

their animals are well fed.

The final option was to take Descartes’s approach and think of animals as

little more than machines and so assume that they were already dead even

while they still lived. This meant that farmers and soldiers need not worry

about the morality of working an animal to death.

Outside of philosophy, Descartes’s most important contributions to shaping

the modern world were in the field of analytical geometry. It was, for

example, using the approach he devised to map coordinates on graphs with

horizontal “x” and vertical “y” axes that Pythagoras’s theorem for

calculating the length of a triangle’s hypotenuse came to be routinely

represented by the simple notation x2+y2=z2. But while Descartes saw

himself as something of an heir to Pythagoras when it came to geometry, he

would not have approved of the avowedly vegetarian Pythagoras’s habit of

purchasing live animals from local markets solely to spare them the

indignity of the butcher’s knife.

Pythagoras’s sentimentality toward animals was unusual in ancient

Greece, where the likes of Aristotle’s views better reflected the norm. Even

if Aristotle believed animals to possess diminished souls, like Descartes, he

insisted that animals lacked reason and because of this it was fine to kill and

consume them without qualm. To his mind, this was all part of the natural

order. “Plants are for the sake of animals, and . . . other animals are for the

sake of human beings.”9

When he argued that animals are for the sake of man, Aristotle wasn’t

only talking about food but also the work done by creatures like oxen,

horses, and hunting dogs. This too was part of the natural order of things.

Perhaps unsurprisingly he rationalized slavery in a similar way. He believed

that slavery was a natural condition and that while some men and women

were enslaved legally as a result of ill fortune, others, especially those who

did manual work, were “slaves by nature.”

“The usefulness of slaves doesn’t differ much from that of animals,” he

explained, since they both provided “bodily service for the necessities of

life.” And because Aristotle considered slavery to be both natural and

moral, the only circumstances he imagined slavery no longer being an

institution would be if there was no work for slaves to do. And the only

circumstances in which he believed that could happen were if somehow

people might invent machines that could work autonomously, “obeying and

anticipating the will of others,” in which case “chief workmen would not

want servants, nor masters, slaves.”10 To him, though, that was something

that might only happen in the world of fantasy and the false stories religious

people told one another, like that of the blacksmith of the gods, Hephaistos,

who cast fire-breathing bulls from bronze and constructed singing maidens

from gold.

Aristotle may have built his reputation by using reason to interrogate the

nature of uncertainty, but he had no doubt that slaves existed precisely so

that people like him could spend their days solving math problems and

having clever arguments rather than producing and preparing food. His

defense of slavery is a reminder of how people in all societies have insisted

that their often wildly different economic and social norms and institutions

reflect nature.

In the ancient Greek city-states, like Athens, Thebes, Sparta, and Corinth,

slavery and serfdom sustained economies that depended first and foremost

on agricultural production. But while the majority of their slaves toiled in

the fields, it was considered appropriate, even desirable, for slaves to do

more cerebral work too. Indeed, in ancient Greece the only jobs that were

the sole preserve of freemen were those in politics. And while slaves were

not entitled to claim any rewards for their labors because they could not, by

definition, own any property themselves, those who worked as lawyers,

bureaucrats, merchants, and craftsmen often enjoyed influence that far

exceeded their official status.

The likes of Aristotle may have sneered at manual laborers, but there

were long periods in the history of ancient Greece where hard work was

considered to be a virtuous duty. Thus in Work and Days, the poet Hesiod’s

description of peasant life in Greece in 700 BC, a Grecian version of the

story of the fall is recounted, in which an angry Zeus punishes humankind

by concealing from them the knowledge of how to sustain themselves for a

year on the basis of only a day’s labor. He also insists that the gods are

angered by “the man who lives in idleness” and moreover that it was only

through hard work that “men become rich in flocks and wealthy.”11

In 1982, the Jamaican-born historical sociologist Orlando Patterson

published a monumental comparative study of sixty-six slaveholding

societies, ranging from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Europe, pre-

colonial Africa, and Asia. It was the result of several years’ work to

establish a sociological rather than a legal or property-based definition of

slavery.12 In it he concluded that being enslaved was above all a form of

“social death,” and noted that in every instance, regardless of the duties

they performed, slaves were distinguished from other marginalized or

exploited social classes because they could not appeal to the social rules

that governed behavior between freemen; could not get married; could not

owe debts or be owed debts; had no right of appeal to judicial institutions;

an injury to them was an injury to their master; and they could not own

anything, because all that they had in their possession belonged legally to

their masters. This meant that even if they could reason, unlike Descartes’s

robotic animals, they were often treated as if they were soulless automata

who like Frankenstein’s monster could only ever dream of being accepted

as whole persons. Therefore when a Roman legionnaire was taken as

captive in war, his family was expected to perform the same ritual duties as

if he had died in battle.

For some slaves, physical death was often preferable to the social death

they endured. In Rome, slaves sometimes attacked their master knowing

full well that the only possible outcome for such an act was execution.

Others, however, gritted their teeth, made the best of their circumstances,

and often found community, rough kinship, and solidarity among other

slaves, and sometimes even with those they served. Deprived of so much

else, many found purpose, pride, and meaning in their work as well,

especially if they were among the luckier few who had more to offer than

just muscle power.

Well-to-do Romans were more likely than Greeks to kill and torture their

slaves for trivial indiscretions. But otherwise they expressed similar

attitudes to slavery and work as the ancient Greeks and, like Victorian

Britons nearly two millennia later, considered themselves to be the

inheritors of the ancient Greeks’ civilization. They too considered manual

work demeaning, and working for a living to be vulgar. It was only

appropriate for citizens to engage in big business, politics, law, the arts, or

military pursuits.

In Imperial Rome, slaves were the muscle used to transform the grand

ambitions of senators, consuls, and Caesars into a sprawling empire; the

mortar that held the magnificence of Rome together and the means for some

to achieve the plebeian dream of retiring as a wealthy landowner. But

during the early years of the Republic, Romans kept relatively few slaves

compared to later. It was only following the influx of slaves captured during

military campaigns as Rome extended its empire that the agricultural model

that fed Rome changed from being one where small-scale freeman farmers

provided the bulk of grain to one where large farming estates called

latifundia dominated agricultural production. Each of these estates

depended almost entirely on slaves, who were enumerated alongside

livestock in farm inventories.

For the four centuries between 200 BC and AD 200, it is thought that

between a quarter and a third of the population of Rome and greater Italy

were slaves. The majority worked as laborers on farms or in quarries whose

surplus produce was hoovered up into the cities. But in the city of Rome,

like ancient Greece, there were few skilled jobs that were not also

performed by slaves. Besides gladiators and prostitutes, and the eighty-nine

recorded different roles that slaves performed in grand and not-so-grand

households,13 slaves worked in almost every imaginable occupation. In fact,

the only profession they were barred from was military service. And while

not as widespread a phenomenon as in ancient Greece, Roman slaves did

occasionally occupy important bureaucratic and secretarial roles, with a

number, the servus publicus, being owned not by individuals but by the city

of Rome itself.

The fact that the Roman economy was sustained by what were, from the

point of view of most citizens, intelligent working machines posed some

similar economic challenges to those posed by large-scale automation. One

of these was wealth inequality.

Early Rome was fed by a network of smallholder farmers across Italy and

as a result there was a relatively close correspondence between household

labor effort and reward. But when much of the work started to be done by

slaves, this economic correspondence proved difficult to sustain. Those

with lots of capital and lots of slaves were able to amass wealth many

orders of magnitude larger than poorer Roman citizens, who had to work

for a living in a labor marketplace in which competent slaves would always

be the economic choice.14 It also made it difficult for small-scale farmers to

compete with larger ones. As a result, many sold their farms to large

landowners and set off to the city in the hope of making a living there.

Indeed, by some calculations, during the final century of the Roman

Empire, three families “may have been the richest private landowners of all

time.”15

Romans competing with slaves for jobs were not helpless. In much the

same way that train drivers on London’s Underground now rely on their

unions to protect their jobs from self-driving or remotely operated trains,

ordinary Romans organized trade guilds to ensure that slaves would not

undermine their interests. Called “artisan colleges”—collegia—these hybrid

religious, social, and commercial organizations often functioned like

mobster-infiltrated members’ clubs, and were the antecedents of the trade

guilds that later wielded considerable power in medieval Europe. In

addition to leveraging their people power to secure lucrative public

contracts for members, many also operated as crime syndicates and ensured

that some wealth at least trickled downward. With separate guilds

established for weavers, fullers, dyers, shoemakers, smiths, doctors,

teachers, painters, fishermen, salt merchants, olive-oil traders, poets, actors,

cart drivers, sculptors, cattle dealers, goldsmiths, and stonemasons among

other professions, there was little that happened in the Roman capital

without the involvement of one guild or another.

As powerful as the artisan collegia were, though, they were rarely able to

do more than fight over the scraps falling from the tables of the wealthy

patricians on whose patronage they depended. Rome’s eventual collapse

was ultimately hastened by the corrosive inequality at its heart.

Many city-states had acquired large empires by conquest before the Romans

dispatched their legions to impose their Pax Romana—Roman Peace—

across most of Europe and the Mediterranean; they were just not very good

at holding them together. There was the Akkadian Empire under Sargon the

Great that blossomed briefly in Mesopotamia around 4,250 years ago; the

Egyptian Empire that extended down the Nile as far as modern Sudan; there

were the Persian empires of Cyrus, Xerxes, and Darius that were later

dwarfed by and briefly incorporated into Alexander of Macedon’s vast but

short-lived empire. Then there were those like the Muaryan Empire, which

after defeating Alexander ruled over much of the Indian subcontinent

between 322 BC and 187 BC; and those of the Qin and Han dynasties in what

is now modern China. But where these ancient empires fragmented almost

as quickly as they were spliced together, the Roman Empire endured for

500 years.

Classicists still argue about what it was that accounted for the Roman

Empire’s exceptionalism, but few dispute that one of the many things that

sustained it was the fact that all roads led to Rome. Because of resources

procured through slave labor in greater Italy and its empire, Rome at its

peak hosted a million citizens and was able to maintain its legions, armies

of bureaucrats, senators, slaves, guilds, and colosseums by sucking in

energy surpluses generated by farmers across the empire.

Much as is the case today in the world’s booming metropolises, the

energy footprint of individuals living in large Roman cities vastly exceeded

that of individuals working the land, and much of that came as a result of

slaves. This energy went into building aqueducts, roads, colosseums, and

thoroughfares; keeping goods flowing through Roman markets; and

maintaining the gilded lifestyles of some very wealthy people. And while

the plebeians scraping a living on Rome’s grimier streets were constantly

reminded of their poverty relative to the patricians, because they lived in a

center to which energy resources flowed they were nevertheless very well

off compared with the peasant farmers working the fields in the provinces.

As a result, some classical scholars have argued that even the lower classes

in the Roman Empire’s provincial towns “enjoyed a high standard of living

not equaled again in Western Europe until the 19th century.”16

Rome translated its military conquests into colonies garrisoned and

administered by Romans living in Roman-style towns and estates that,

while siphoning off wealth, also dispatched shiploads of plunder, taxes, and

tributes to Rome. Some of this wealth took the form of gold, silver,

minerals, textiles, and luxury items. But mostly it took the form of the

agricultural surpluses and other food. As a result, the million or so people

living in the capital, as well as the major provincial towns, happily

consumed olives from Portugal, garum from Spain, oysters from Brittany,

fish from the Mediterranean and Black Sea, figs from Carthage, wine from

Greece, and honey, spices, cheeses, dried fruits, and aromatics from across

the empire. But most importantly of all, they consumed bread and porridge

made from wheat or barley. These were regularly distributed as rations to as

many as 200,000 poorer Romans every month at the expense of the Roman

treasury by consuls and emperors alike, who recognized that curbing civil

dissent in their swollen city required making sure the plebeians were well

fed and occasionally distracted by lavish triumphs, colosseums, and other

public entertainment.

The trouble Rome’s leaders went to in order to keep their citizens

distracted, and the efforts taken by Roman collegia to protect their trades

from slaves, are a reminder of the next great transformation in the history of

work after the initial embrace of agriculture: the congregation of ever more

people in big cities and towns, places where for the first time in human

history a majority of people’s work did not focus on the procurement of the

energy resources they needed to survive.

PART FOUR

Creatures of the City

THE BRIGHT LIGHTS

In August 2007, Thadeus Gurirab packed his clothes and a laminated copy

of his school-leaving certificate into a flimsy carryall, and made his way

from the small family farm in eastern Namibia to the capital city,

Windhoek. Thadeus’s parents always knew that their small farm could

never support more than one family. They insisted that he, the second of

four siblings, attend school so he might eventually get a “city job.”

On arrival, Thadeus moved in with his paternal uncle, his aunt, her

mother, and their three children. They lived in a corrugated-iron shack on a

rocky “plot” in Havana, a sprawling informal settlement on the hilly

outskirts of the city.

Over a decade later, Thadeus still lives on the same plot in Havana. His

uncle and aunt moved away in 2012, leaving the plot to him. He now has a

“double job” as a security guard and janitor at one of the many evangelical

churches where urban migrants congregate every Sunday to pray for good

fortune. And he generates a little extra cash by renting out an additional

corrugated-iron shack he built on the plot, which has enough space for a

single mattress. It is home to two young men, both recent arrivals from the

east, who also work as security guards. One sleeps in the shack during the

day and works night shifts, while the other works day shifts and sleeps there

at night.

Thadeus is pleased with this arrangement. It means that someone is

always on the plot to keep an eye on things. Since 2012, Havana has nearly

doubled in size and is not as safe as it used to be. He points out that the hills

his shack overlooks, which were deserted when he arrived, are now just as

crowded with structures as the side of the valley he lives on. And because

hardly any of the new arrivals can find jobs, they have no choice but to beg

or steal.

With a population of just half a million people, greater Windhoek is a

fraction of the size of many of the world’s larger cities. Yet what has

happened there is much the same as what has happened in many other parts

of the developing world, albeit on a smaller scale.

Back in 1991, close to three-quarters of all Namibians still lived in the

countryside. In the little over a quarter of a century since, Namibia’s total

population has almost doubled. But while the rural population has increased

by only one-fifth, Namibia’s urban population has quadrupled in size,

mainly because of people like Thadeus making their way to the cities

because the countryside was full. As a result, there are now nearly as many

Namibians living in cities as there were people in the whole country in

1991. And with a government insufficiently solvent to take on a mass

housing program and unemployment rates hovering around 46 percent

among young adults, most of these new arrivals have to make do in

informal settlements like Havana.

In 2007, Thadeus was one of an estimated 75 million1 new urban

dwellers across the globe, many of whom, like him, left their countryside

homes to make their fortunes in cities and towns. Each of them played a

small role in pushing our species across an important historical threshold.

By the beginning of 2008, more people lived in cities than in the

countryside for the first time in our species’ history.2

Proportion of the population living in urban areas, 1500–20163

The speed of our transition from a species who didn’t much care to

modify their environments to one that dwells in vast, complex,

manufactured colonies is unique in evolutionary history. Where the

urbanization of termites, ants, and bees occurred over millions of years,

among humans it occurred in the blink of an evolutionary eye.

Humans may have only recently become what the Ju/’hoansi used to

describe as “creatures of the city.” Even so, ever since the first small ancient

cities started to coalesce in the Middle East, China, India, Mesoamerica,

and South America, they have been crucibles of creativity, innovation,

power, and diversity. They have also exercised an outsized influence over

human affairs relative to their populations. It was not until the Industrial

Revolution that cities anywhere routinely accounted for more than a fifth of

the total population of any region, yet by then what happened in cities had

already been dictating the trajectory of human history for upward of 5,000

years.

Many of the most recent chapters in the story of Homo sapiens’

transformation into an urban species are written in the improvised, often

chaotic freehand of crowded shanty towns that, like Havana, bloom on the

fringes of the developing world’s cities and towns. Up to 1.6 billion people

now live in slums and shanty towns. The largest—like Kibera in Kenya,

Ciudad Neza outside Mexico City, Orangi Town in Pakistan, and Mumbai’s

Dharavi—have populations counted in millions and are in some ways cities

within cities. Their spidery thoroughfares stretch for mile after unplanned

mile and have grown so fast that the best local municipal authorities have

been able to do is scurry frantically behind them, clipboards in hand, trying

to calculate how much it would cost and whether it is possible to retrofit

basic services like water, sewerage, and electricity.

Other recent chapters in the story of our drift into cities are written in

altogether more orderly scripts. Most impressive is the oversized

calligraphy of modern China’s urban planners and architects. Forty years

ago, four in five Chinese lived in the countryside; now three in five live in

homes and workplaces made of glass, cement, and steel. Many of these are

organized around wide, ruler-straight tar roads, and served by a well-

integrated water, energy, waste, and communications infrastructure. The

movement of 250 million rural Chinese into cities to take up jobs in its

rapidly growing manufacturing sector between 1979 and 2010 was the

single largest migration event in human history. It resulted not only in the

almost overnight appearance of brand-new, still under-occupied “ghost

cities” but also saw established cities swallowing up sequences of quiet

rural hamlets, villages, farms, and towns, as they expanded into the

countryside.

For Vere Gordon Childe, the “urban revolution” was the crucial second

phase of the agricultural revolution. The first phase involved the painfully

slow process of gradually domesticating livestock, grains, and other plant

crops over many generations. It was also characterized by gradual

development and refinement of simple technologies like artificial irrigation,

the plow, draft animals, brick-making, and metallurgy, which

“demonstrably furthered the biological welfare of our species by facilitating

its multiplication.”4

By contrast, the urban phase, he argued, only ever came about once a

critical threshold in agricultural productivity was crossed and farmers were

able to generate consistently large enough surpluses to support bureaucrats,

artists, politicians, and others that they were generous enough not to think

of as “freeloaders.” It was characterized by the appearance of cities that

were provisioned by merchants, governed by monarchs, and administered

by priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats.

Childe was almost certainly right, at the very least in terms of the history

of work. Ancient cities only ever appeared once local farmers were able to

produce sufficiently grand energy surpluses to reliably sustain large

populations that did not need to work in the fields. And where energy was

abundant, people, like masked weavers, first used it to build great

monolithic monuments like Göbekli Tepe or Stonehenge, and later proper

towns and cities.

The first cities in Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas were as much

accidents of geography as they were testaments to the ingenuity of local

people. People in both Papua New Guinea and China, for instance, started

to experiment with agriculture sometime between 10,000 and 11,000 years

ago. But by 4,000 years ago, when Chinese farmers, who lucked out by

domesticating high-yielding rice and millet, were consistently generating

surpluses large enough to establish and then sustain the first line of urban-

based imperial dynasties, Papua New Guinean farmers were never able to

develop much more than largish villages based on the humbler energy

yields they generated from cultivating taro and yam and husbanding pigs.

Indeed, it was only during the colonial era after high-yielding cereals like

rice were imported into New Guinea that anything like a proper city could

be sustained there. Mesoamericans were similarly hamstrung by the lack of

high-yielding food plants. They only generated surpluses big enough to

sustain cities less than a thousand years ago when, after thousands of

generations of artificial selection, maize eventually came to resemble

something like the high-yielding crop we know today.

Besides getting lucky with indigenous cultivars, the other two important

variables in the geographical equation were climate and topography. It is no

coincidence that the first cities in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the

Indian subcontinent all developed in climates particularly well suited to

cereal production, and in the floodplains of magnificent river systems that

were subject to seasonal flooding. Before anyone worked out the value of

fertilizer or established the principles of well-organized crop rotation,

populations in these areas relied on floods dispatched by their river gods to

refresh their topsoils with rich alluviums and organic matter gathered from

further upstream.

In much the same way that some scientists speculate that entropy meant that

the appearance of life on earth was almost inevitable, so history suggests

that the creation of cities and towns wherever people became sufficiently

productive food producers was inevitable too.

Like living organisms, cities are born, sustained, and grown by capturing

energy and putting it to work. And when for one reason or another cities

cease to be able to secure the energy they need, like organisms deprived of

air, food, and water, they surrender to entropy, decay, and die. In the early

years of our species’ urban history, this was more common than one might

think. Sometimes cities and towns were throttled by rivals who laid siege to

them. On other occasions they perished because of droughts, plagues, and

other acts of God. This is thought to have been the fate of the many ancient

cities, towns, and settlements that appear to archaeologists to have been

abandoned for no obvious reason almost overnight.

Up until the Industrial Revolution, even in the most sophisticated and

productive agricultural civilizations, like ancient Rome, four out of five

people still lived in the countryside and worked the land. But the one in five

people who lived in cities in the most productive ancient agricultural

economies were pioneers of a whole new way of working.

As the first large assemblies of people who did not spend any time or

effort producing food, they were led by a cocktail of circumstances,

curiosity, and boredom to find other creative things to do with their energy.

And like well-fed weaver birds heeding entropy’s demand to do work, the

more energy cities captured from surrounding farmland, the bigger they

grew and the busier their citizens got. Much of that energy went into

sourcing the materials for building, maintaining, and renewing basic

infrastructure. This resulted in the emergence of many new specialist trades,

like carpentry, stonemasonry and architecture, engineering, hydrology, and

sewerage. Lots of energy also went into building temples and sustaining

holy orders, to flatter and appease demanding deities with sacrifices and

tributes, as well as meeting the entirely novel challenge of maintaining

order among large assemblies of people whose ancestors for 300,000 years

had lived in small mobile bands. This required bureaucrats, judges, soldiers,

and those who specialized in keeping order and binding people together into

urban communities with common values, beliefs, and goals.

Legends telling of the origins of ancient cities, like the tale of the

abandoned twins Romulus and Remus who were suckled by wolves before

Romulus murdered his brother and established Rome, fill a vacuum in our

collective history. In most instances, we can only speculate how and why

small villages mushroomed into towns or cities, beyond the expansions

being made possible by energy surpluses from agriculture. Doubtless there

were as many paths that led to the foundation of ancient metropolises like

Athens, Rome, Chengzhou (now Luoyang), Memphis in Egypt, Great

Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe in southern Africa, and Tenochtitlán, whose

ruins lie beneath Mexico City, as there were roads that would later lead into

and out of them. Some cities almost certainly began life as ceremonial

centers or as geographically well-positioned meeting places, where people

congregated seasonally to socialize, worship, and exchange gifts, ideas,

fears, dreams, and spouses. Others almost certainly coalesced during times

of conflict in places that were easy to defend; where the strong might offer

patronage or protection to the weak, and where people fell under the spell

of charismatic leaders with grand ambitions and inflated egos.

Cities lived or died on the basis of common rules of behavior and the

ability of their citizens to bind themselves together with shared experiences,

beliefs, and values, and then to extend these into the countryside that fed

them.

As farming populations grew courtesy of additional energy, territory and

access to resources like good soils and water assumed ever greater value.

On top of this, during periods after harvests when food was plentiful and

there were no great monolithic monuments to build, men were left with

time to think about impressing women, impressing one another, and

following up on grudges, enmities, and insults that had festered while they

were too busy working. Thus as often as people came together to expend

seasonal surpluses on building monuments like Stonehenge, they also came

together to fight. It is because of this that archaeologists interested in

digging up sites from early Neolithic Europe will expect to spend a good

deal of their time excavating the buried remains of fortified villages and

mass graves showing evidence of torture, ritual murder, and sometimes

cannibalism.5

Even if the prospect of being butchered by villagers on the other side of

the valley left many early Neolithic people constantly on guard, few would

have ever thought of themselves as soldiers, or the episodic assemblies of

angry, warpainted farmers from one or two villages as an army. Most armed

conflict during the early Neolithic must have been similar to that which

occurred in many pre-colonial African farming societies like the Nuer and

Dinka, as well as among forest horticulturists in South America like the

Yanomamo, or rival villages in Papua New Guinea. In other words,

gruesome massacres were far rarer than ritualized battles that involved

more dressing up, strutting, posturing, and insult-hurling than actual

bloodshed.

With the emergence of cities and states all that changed. City dwellers’

work was determined by the demands of expending energy, and one of the

first things it was used for was the development of professional standing

armies capable of keeping peace within the city walls and protecting energy

resources or expanding access to them.

With urbanites no longer hostage to the challenges of food production, the

first cities gave rise to an efflorescence of new professions. And in cities,

some of these professions assumed a level of social importance that would

have been unimaginable to mobile foragers or even farmers living in small

villages.

Working life for most people in the oldest proper city we know of, Uruk

in Mesopotamia, was probably not very different from working life in cities

like Paris, London, Mumbai, or Shanghai on the cusp of the Industrial

Revolution. The ruins of Uruk lie on a fertile bend on the Euphrates River

some 20 miles east of modern Samawah in Iraq. The city was founded

around 6,000 years ago and was only finally abandoned after the Islamic

conquest of Mesopotamia in the seventh century AD. At its prime, 5,000

years ago, it is thought to have been home to up to 80,000 citizens. And like

most other big cities that emerged later, people involved in similar trades in

Uruk tended to live and work together in the same districts.

Many neighborhoods in modern London, for instance, retain close

historical associations with specific trades. While some of these trades have

since disappeared and many old neighborhoods have lost their distinctive

associations with specific trades courtesy of the arrival of shopping malls,

online retail, superstores, and gentrification, some still remain. London’s

Harley Street, Hatton Garden, Savile Row, Soho, and the Square Mile all

retain close associations with trades that have been going on for centuries.

Others, like Camden for offbeat urban fashion or Tottenham Court Road for

electronics, are associated with relatively new ones.

The historical association of specific neighborhoods with particular

trades was not a quirk of zoning regulations or the result of careful urban

planning. Nor was it the consequence of the fact that it makes good

commercial sense for consumers looking for particular items to be able to

go to one part of town to compare different wares on offer. It was because

in the pulsing, plural hearts of big cities, people found companionship and

comfort among others who did similar work and so shared similar

experiences, with the result that in cities people’s individual social identities

often merged with the trades they performed.

Inscriptions on tombstones and written records from Imperial Rome

describe 268 different career paths that ancient Romans pursued. Besides

bureaucratic, construction, engineering, artisanal, mercantile, and soldiering

jobs, many other jobs Romans did were the antecedents of some of the

service-sector jobs that now account for most employment in modern,

mainly urban states like the United States. And among the ranks of Roman

service-sector personnel were lawyers, scribes, secretaries, accountants,

chefs, administrators, advisers, teachers, prostitutes, poets, musicians,

sculptors, painters, entertainers, and courtesans who—assuming they could

secure the right patronage or were independently wealthy—could dedicate

all their working lives to achieving mastery of their particular art.

In both early Neolithic and forager communities, most individuals’ sense

of belonging, community, and identity was shaped by sharing geography,

language, beliefs, and kinship, and underwritten by the fact that people did

similar kinds of work, often together.

People in ancient cities didn’t have the security of being part of a single

geographically distinct community cross-cut with ties of kinship. They also

didn’t have the luxury of knowing everybody they encountered. Like urban

dwellers today, they spent much of their time rubbing shoulders with

complete strangers, many of whom led very different lives despite perhaps

sharing loyalty to a common leader, having a common language, living

under the same laws and in the same geography. And many of the regular

day-to-day interactions between people in different professions in cities

only ever took place in the context of performing those roles. Thus, for

example, a chef in ancient Rome would have interacted regularly, if only

ever briefly, with the toga-wearing patricians who feasted on the herb-

stuffed dormice he prepared, the dormouse catcher who slept outside, and

the merchants who provided his other ingredients. He would have had very

little to do with any of them outside of the context of work, and possibly

even found encountering them at social gatherings awkward. But he would

have spent a great deal of time with his colleagues and co-workers in the

kitchen, probably more than he did with his family at home, or the

acquaintances he sometimes played knucklebones with in the forum when

he had time off. He would have also spent time with fellow chefs whose

perspective on the world had been shaped and molded by the skills they

learned in the kitchen and symbolized in the burn scars on their arms. In

short, they had a great deal more in common with one another than they did

with soldiers, senators, cup-bearers, and full-time dormouse trappers. The

same held true for anybody in any other skilled profession.

Just as is the case now, to be a chef or a poet or a bricklayer in ancient

Rome was to join a community of practice built on shared experiences and

shared skills often mastered over the course of long apprenticeships. And in

Rome, as with many other cities, over time people involved in similar

trades often coalesced into multi-generational micro-communities whose

children played together and married one another, and who shared religious

practices, values, and social status. Indeed, as urban societies grew more

established, so professions merged ever more with social, political, and

even religious identity. Nowhere was this process more obvious than in

India, where individual trades came to be inseparable from the rigid castes

that prescribed where and among whom individuals lived, how they

worshipped, how they were treated by others, and what the professions of

their offspring would be.

In Rome, these communities of practice formed the basis of the artisan

collegia, which in addition to helping to protect workers in key trades from

being marginalized by slaves gave individuals a sense of community, civic

identity, and belonging. As a result, contrary to the current narrative that the

marketplace is a hotbed of kill-or-be-killed competition, for much of history

people in similar trades usually cooperated, collaborated, and supported one

another.

These tightly bound communities evolved because people who shared

skills and experiences unique to their crafts tended to make sense of the

world in similar ways, and also because their social status was often also

defined by their trade. Unsurprisingly, this remains the case now. Many of

us not only spend our working lives in the company of colleagues, but also

a fair portion of our lives outside of the workplace in their company too.

Of these myriad new professions that emerged when people congregated

in cities, two entirely new classes of work were especially important. The

first was a by-product of the invention of writing, and the second of the

emergence and increasing power of the merchants who controlled the

allocation and distribution of energy and other resources procured from the

countryside.

All foraging and early Neolithic societies had rich visual cultures and

communicated with one another by means of a host of symbols pregnant

with meaning. But it was not until the emergence of cities that anyone

developed any visual representation system as versatile as writing.

Like agriculture, writing systems were developed independently by

unrelated populations in different parts of the world within a relatively short

period of time. At least three entirely self-contained writing systems, from

which most of the contemporary scripts we are familiar with today

developed, came out of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica.

The origins and meanings of the voluptuous glyphs and symbols used by

the Olmecs in the Gulf of Mexico sometime around 600 to 500 BC that were

adopted into the Mayan writing system a thousand years later are uncertain.

As are the origins of the already sophisticated standardized signs and

symbols inscribed onto the oldest examples of writing from China, which

take the form of inscribed animal bones and turtle shells from the Shang

Dynasty three and a half millennia ago.

But it has been easier to chart the origins of the oldest system of writing

we know of, that of the Sumerians in Uruk. Their distinctive cuneiform

script’s evolution has been tracked through three stages. In the oldest phase,

spanning 4,500 years and beginning possibly 10,000 years ago, transactions

were accounted for using clay tokens representing units of goods. The next

phase involved transforming these three-dimensional tokens into

pictographs on clay tablets, again used for accounting. And the final phase,

the precursor to alphabetic writing, began around 5,000 years ago and

involved using pictographs to systematically represent spoken language.

The world’s oldest pay record: a cuneiform tablet documenting payment of workers in beer c. 3000

BC, on display at the British Museum

The specific cognitive implications of literacy continue to be debated.

Like any other complex skills acquired and mastered when young and

cognitively plastic, it clearly has some impact on shaping how our brains

are organized and how we think and perceive the world. The debate focuses

not on whether this happens but how profound the consequences are. Some

insist that the cognitive and psychological changes brought about by

literacy are fundamental. They argue that it resulted in the privileging of

sight over other senses and encouraged the development of a more

scientific, visually ordered and “rational” way of looking at the world.

Others, though, are much more skeptical and take the view that the

fundamental intellectual architecture required to read and write is no

different from that needed to translate the sounds we use to make

meaningful vocal speech, or to interpret animal tracks in the sand, and other

meaningful visual signs.

There is, however, no debate about the fact that even if the ability to

faithfully represent spoken words and complex ideas in the form of written

symbols did not radically change the way people perceived the world

around them, without it we would be deprived not only of much history,

philosophy, and poetry, but also of the tools necessary to develop complex

abstract models that made most important discoveries in mathematics, the

sciences, and engineering possible. There is also no debate that the

invention of writing led to a whole universe of new, previously

unimaginable desk jobs and professions, from scribes to architects, many of

which were high status not least because of the energy and effort that was

invested in mastering literacy. “Put writing in your heart that you may

protect yourself from hard labor of any kind,” an Egyptian father famously

said to his son as he dispatched him to school in the third millennium BC,

adding that “the scribe is released from manual tasks” and that it is “he who

commands.”6

It is clear that literacy fundamentally transformed the nature and exercise

of power as well. It did this by providing the means for early states to

establish functioning bureaucracies and formalized legal systems, by means

of which they could organize and manage far larger populations and

implement far more ambitious projects. It also provided those who had

mastered reading and writing with the ability to claim privileged access to

the words and will of gods.

There is no doubt that literacy transformed the world of commerce, by

enabling the establishment of formalized currencies, the keeping of

complex accounts, the creation of financial and banking institutions, and

also the possibility of accumulating wealth that often existed only in the

form of ledgers.

Archaeologists have recovered more than 100,000 samples of Sumerian

cuneiform writing, among them letters, recipes, legal documents, histories,

poetry, and maps, as well as many documents relating to commerce. These

include a 5,000-year-old payslip showing that the thirsty citizens of Uruk,

like the laborers who built Egypt’s Pyramids, were content to be

remunerated for their work in beer; 4,000-year-old receipts documenting the

exchange of goods ranging from animal fodder to textiles; and the oldest

known complaint letter, which was written by an irate customer to a

merchant complaining of the delivery of substandard goods sometime

around 1750 BC.

In cities, material security was not based on producing food energy or

other raw materials but on controlling its distribution and use. All ancient

cities had marketplaces, from Athens’s sprawling agora to Rome’s

somewhat more orderly forum with its boutique-like shops.

The development of markets in ancient cities like Uruk was partially a

consequence of the fact that the kind of exchange relationships typical

between people in small agricultural settlements was simply not possible in

cities. Where people in rural communities tended to exchange and share

things mainly with people they knew or were related to, in cities most

exchanges occurred between strangers. This meant that the traditional

norms and customs dealing with reciprocity and mutual obligation couldn’t

apply.

Liberated from these obligations, city merchants quickly learned that

trade was a possible route to wealth and power. And this was important

because while among farming communities people were preoccupied with

meeting their basic needs, in towns and cities other, different needs and

desires shaped people’s ambitions, and correspondingly how and why they

worked.

THE MALADY OF INFINITE ASPIRATION

It takes roughly twenty-five minutes to drive from Thadeus’s shack in

Havana to Windhoek’s city center, if you avoid the chaos of battered taxis

that clog the roads during the morning and evening rush hours. The journey

takes you first through two old townships, where black and “mixed race”

people were required to live during apartheid, then into Windhoek’s middle-

class northwestern suburbs, before you finally reach the well-manicured

heart of the city, where from the roof terrace of the Hilton Hotel you can see

grand shopping malls, restaurants, air-conditioned multi-story offices and,

in the distance, smoke from cooking fires in Havana is visible. As you

progress from Havana to the city center, increasing wealth is signified by

the fancier vehicles parked in driveways and the escalating grandeur of the

houses, shops, and office buildings. It is also signified by the elaborateness

of the security systems. In Havana, security consists mainly of the eyes and

ears of trusted neighbors; in the township it takes the form of low walls

surrounding simple cement brick houses with barred windows and firmly

padlocked doors. But as you enter the city proper you progress from smaller

houses surrounded by low walls topped with razor wire or broken glass to

grand houses with towering walls crowned with ominously buzzing electric

fencing, infrared motion detectors, mounted cameras, and uniformed

security guards armed with sticks, whips, and sometimes guns. Many of the

security personnel, like Thadeus, come from Havana. And they are there to

guard homes, shops, and businesses from other people from Havana.

No one in Windhoek considers their security arrangements to be overkill.

It is rare for robberies there to be accompanied by the callous brutality that

so often characterizes similar crimes in neighboring South African cities,

but even so, there are few people, rich and poor, in Windhoek who have not

been victims of a robbery or mugging. And while richer Windhoekers

complain incessantly about crime being out of control and attribute it to

race, immorality, and the incompetence of the police, they all know that it is

not going to change any time soon.

Some robberies in Windhoek are perpetrated by people who are simply

hungry. If the intruders manage to circumvent the security in your house,

the first place they ransack is the kitchen. But many others are motivated by

a different kind of scarcity. One shaped by the fact that in the city people

are constantly confronted by others who have much more (and better) stuff

than they do.

In this sense, Windhoek is the same as every other city in the world. For

as long as people have congregated in cities, their ambitions have been

molded by a different kind of scarcity from that which shapes those of

subsistence farmers, a form of scarcity articulated in the language of

aspiration, jealousy, and desire rather than of absolute need. And for most,

this kind of relative scarcity is the spur to work long hours, to climb the

social ladder, and to keep up with the Joneses.

Most economists are wary of interrogating the specific needs or desires that

might make things seem scarce in the first place. They dispose of questions

such as why non-essential things like diamonds are more valuable than

essential things like water as the “paradox of value,” and for the most part

are content to say that it doesn’t much bother them why or what motivates

different needs, as the relative value of those needs will be adjudicated by

markets.

John Maynard Keynes broke ranks with many of his colleagues in this

respect when he made the case that automation would solve the economic

problem. He argued that the economic problem had two distinct

components and that automation could only ever solve the first of these:

those that dealt with what he called the urge to meet our “absolute needs.”

These needs, like food, water, warmth, comfort, companionship, and safety,

were universal, absolute, and experienced equally by everyone, from a

prisoner in chains to a monarch in a palace. And while these needs were

critical, Keynes believed they were not infinite. After all, when you are

warm enough, putting another log on the fire might make you too hot, or

when you have eaten enough, eating more will make you feel ill. The

second component of the economic problem was our desire to meet what

Keynes called our “relative needs.” These needs, he believed, truly were

infinite, because as soon as we met any of them they would be quickly

replaced by another probably more ambitious one. These needs were those

that reflected people’s ambitions to “keep up with the Joneses,” to secure a

promotion at work, to purchase a grander house, to drive a better car, to eat

fancier food, and to achieve greater power. These needs, he also believed,

were what motivated us to work harder still, even after our absolute needs

were met.

Keynes was not clear about whether he considered his absolute needs to

include having wines appropriately matched to the food he was eating, a

country house for weekends, or decent Turkish tobacco for his pipe. But in

distinguishing between absolute and relative needs, he recognized the

importance of social context and status in shaping people’s desires. In this

respect, he was thinking more like social anthropologists who unlike

economists are interested in understanding why in some contexts, such as

cities, diamonds are more valuable than water, whereas in others, such as

traditional foraging communities in the Kalahari Desert—which now hosts

the two richest diamond mines ever discovered—diamonds were worthless

but water was priceless.

The idea that inequality is natural and inevitable is invoked as often in the

teachings of Vedic, Confucian, Islamic, and European classical philosophy

as it is in the rhetoric of many politicians. For almost as long as people have

lived in cities and recorded their thoughts in writing, there have been those

who, like Aristotle, have insisted that inequality is an inescapable fact of

life. There have, of course, been many dissenting voices too; those whose

message of equality has chimed with those at the bottom of the economic,

social, or political pile, and which has periodically been screamed from

behind makeshift barricades across roads during periods of upheaval,

rebellion, and revolution.

Foragers like the Ju/’hoansi remind us that we are as capable of ordering

ourselves into fiercely egalitarian societies as we are of ordering ourselves

into rigid hierarchies. As a result, many historians have argued that even if

inequality is not a brute fact of human nature, then along with zoonotic

diseases, despotism, and war, it was probably a direct and immediate

consequence of our embrace of agriculture. They reason that as soon as

people had big surpluses to hoard, exchange, or distribute, the more

miserable angels of our nature took over.

But extreme inequality was not an immediate and organic consequence

of our ancestors’ transition to farming. Many early agricultural societies

were far more egalitarian than modern urban ones, and in ancient rural

villages and hamlets people often worked cooperatively, shared the product

of their labors evenly, and only hoarded surpluses for collective benefit.

There is also plenty of evidence to suggest this archaic form of “kibbutz”

egalitarianism endured because it was an effective way to manage the

recurrent episodes of material scarcity that fast-growing farming

populations routinely suffered. Thus, for instance, the small-scale farmers

who established themselves across much of what is now Spain and Portugal

over the course of the first millennium BC are thought by some

archaeologists to have been “assertively egalitarian”—until the Roman

legions appeared on the horizon in the first century BC.1

Interestingly, the oldest almost-urban settlement discovered so far,

Çatalhöyük in Turkey, was probably similarly materially egalitarian too.

But it was not like any of the other ancient towns and cities that followed.

Its ruins are made up of hundreds of similar-sized domestic dwellings

clustered tightly together, almost like cells in a beehive, suggesting no one

was measurably richer than anyone else. There were also no obvious public

spaces like markets, squares, temples, or plazas and no public

thoroughfares, paths, or roads, leaving archaeologists to conclude that

people got from one place to the next by scrambling across rooftops and

entering their and others’ homes through the ceilings.

The absence of evidence for extreme material inequality based on the

layout and size of individual dwellings does not imply the existence of

anything resembling the fierce egalitarianism that was characteristic of

small-scale forager societies like the Ju/’hoansi. Based purely on the layout

of domestic dwellings, for example, the great Bantu civilizations that

expanded through much of central, eastern, and southern Africa over the

course of the last 1,500 years might at first appear highly egalitarian. But

this was not remotely the case. For centuries, these societies were animated

by grand ambitions, political intrigue, and power plays, and were structured

around ranked age-group sets, gender hierarchies, and huge differentials in

wealth measured in the form of cattle that often grazed far beyond the

village perimeters under the stewardship of herd boys. Indeed, in many

agricultural societies, dwelling size, which to those of us who live in the

world’s heavily commoditized property markets is an unambiguous

indicator of wealth, was considered unimportant. Likewise, in many

hierarchical societies, chiefs, nobles, commoners, and slaves often lived in

the same buildings. Just as importantly, wealth was often measured in

highly abstract ways. In many Native American civilizations, for instance,

the right to use specific crests or perform specific songs and rites was an

arbiter of status and power, just as access to ritual knowledge was an arbiter

of power in many African societies. Whether or not some small-scale

Neolithic farming settlements were highly egalitarian, life in the world’s big

cities has historically been anything but, despite the episodic attempts by

revolutionary-minded populations to remedy this.

The oldest written history of a city takes the form of an epic poem and

describes the achievements of Gilgamesh, an early king of Uruk, famed for

building the city’s walls, and who was later determined to have been a god.

Drafted in cuneiform, the oldest of many versions of Gilgamesh found so

far was written some 4,100 years ago, and was almost certainly an

inscription of an oral narrative passed down and judiciously embroidered

over the generations. The Epic of Gilgamesh is of course more myth than

history; more gilded flattery than fact. But when read alongside other

cuneiform documents from the same time, detailing the rights and

requirements of ordinary citizens under the reforms implemented by the

Sumerian King Urukagima 4,500 years ago, they offer a surprisingly

nuanced insight into life in this, the most ancient of all urban centers.

These indicate not just the many different professions that people in Uruk

and other early Mesopotamian city-states pursued, but also the fact that

Uruk, like New York, London, or Shanghai today, was anything but

egalitarian and that, also like New York, London, or Shanghai, merchants

and moneymen were able to leverage their control over the supply and

distribution of surpluses to achieve a status comparable to that of nobles

and clergy.

Citizens of Uruk 4,500 years ago fell into five distinct social classes. At

the top of the pile were royalty and nobility. They claimed their privileged

status by descent from ancient kings like Gilgamesh and kinship with gods.

Immediately below them were the holy orders: the priests and priestesses.

They claimed their power from proximity to kings and their role as

intermediaries between men and gods, as the custodians of holy places and

objects, and their more mundane role as bureaucrats in charge of the most

important urban spaces. Besides slaves, who were not counted as proper

persons, those at the bottom of the pile were what might be referred to now

as the “working classes.” These included the farmers who mainly lived

outside the city walls and, within the city, tradesmen and women, among

them the butchers, fishermen, cup-bearers, brick makers, brewers, tavern

owners, masons, carpenters, perfume makers, potters, goldsmiths, and cart

drivers, who either worked for others or ran small businesses of their own.

Squeezed between them and the holy orders were soldiers, accountants,

architects, astrologers, teachers, high-end prostitutes, and wealthy

merchants.

In places like Uruk, becoming a wealthy merchant was almost certainly

the only path, short of fomenting revolution, that ordinary people could

follow to bridge the chasm that separated them from nobility. Accumulating

wealth in other words offered the opportunity of upward mobility for those

who worked the hardest, were luckiest, and were the most cunning.

The archaeology of ancient Sumerian cities suggests, perhaps

unsurprisingly, that among the most promising trades to take up for those

with ambitions of climbing the social ladder was brewing and selling beer.

In part this was because beer, like wheat and silver, was a form of currency.

It was also because beer houses provided loans to hard-up farmers who

probably agreed to interest rates and default penalties that they would never

have dreamed of accepting when sober. While it is not certain how

significant the opportunities for upward mobility for barkeeps were, it is

telling that the only woman who appears on the list of ancient Sumerian

monarchs, Queen Kubaba, started life as a lowly tavern owner before

assuming power over the city of Kish, which she is recorded as having

ruled for a hundred years.

The proportion of people employed in agriculture in any country is usually

a pretty good measure of that country’s wealth. Those with the highest

proportion in farming-related jobs are typically among the poorest, have the

lowest levels of agricultural productivity, and the lowest levels of

industrialization. All of the ten countries where over three-quarters of the

workforce still describe themselves as farmers are in sub-Saharan Africa.

By contrast, in the United States, less than 2 percent of the working

population are now employed in a high-tech agricultural industry that

routinely produces such huge surpluses that close to 660 pounds of food per

person is wasted in the pipeline between field and plate every year.2 This is

the norm in most industrialized countries where agriculture has been

transformed over the last three centuries from a labor-intensive enterprise to

a capital-intensive one, by a series of new technologies and practices that

have dramatically increased productivity while simultaneously vastly

reducing the dependency on human labor.

The rapid expansion of the northern towns and cities that were to become

the epicenter of Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century

was not solely to meet the labor demands of new mills, foundries, mines,

and factories. Nor was it the result of hordes of optimistic country folk

moving into the cities with ambitions of either making or marrying into a

fortune. Rather it was catalyzed by substantial and rapid improvements in

agricultural productivity that were made possible by technological

advances. Coupled with the consolidation of agricultural landholdings by

wealthier farmers, this meant that there was simply no useful work for

many among the fast-growing rural population to do in the countryside.

Life for farmers in the earliest agricultural states was not very different

from that of farmers in Renaissance Europe. The basic technologies they

used for plowing, planting, harvesting, weeding, irrigating, and processing

their crops may have been refined over time, and sometimes very cleverly

adapted for use in different environments, but they were in many respects

fundamentally unchanged up until the late sixteenth century, when the near-

simultaneous development and widespread adoption of a sequence of new

techniques and technologies dramatically improved energy yields on

European farms. Most important among these were the adoption of the

highly efficient Dutch plow, which turned the sod better than its

predecessors could, and could be pulled by a single draft animal; the

intensive use of both natural and artificial fertilizers; a greater focus on

selective breeding; and more sophisticated crop rotation systems. Between

1550 and 1850, net yields in wheat and oats per acre farmed in Britain

nearly quadrupled, yields in rye and barley tripled, and yields in peas and

beans doubled.3 This increase in productivity catalyzed a surge in

population growth. In 1750, the population of Great Britain was around 5.7

million people. But thanks to the surge in agricultural productivity it tripled

to 16.6 million by 1850, and by 1871, double that again. And where roughly

half of Britain’s workforce were farmers in 1650, by 1850 that had dropped

to one in five.

The process was further accelerated by slavery, colonialism, and trade

with the New World. Apart from the fact that profits from the slave trade

helped finance the construction of Britain’s textile mills, by 1860 roughly 4

million enslaved Africans in the United States also provided nearly 90

percent of the raw material for industrial Britain’s first large-scale industry:

cotton.

In the century preceding the Industrial Revolution, Mughal India, which

by then was under the effective control of Britain’s East India Company,

was the largest manufacturer and exporter of goods anywhere in the world.

Its relatively cheap chintz, cotton, and calico textiles fed a consumer

revolution among the well-to-do in urban Europe, as a result of which

Britain’s by then well-established cottage industry producing mainly

woolen garments began to struggle. In 1700, with irate shepherds, weavers,

dyers, and spinners hounding local politicians and anyone else who would

listen, Parliament enacted the first of its Calico Acts, under which the

importation and sale of finished cotton products into Britain was at first

restricted and then banned. What at first sounded like good news for the

shepherds, weavers, and dyers proved to be the worst possible result for

them. Raw cotton flooded in from plantations in North America to fill the

gap, giving just the boost the textile mills needed to completely undermine

the cottage textile industry.

Just as important were the millions of Caribbean slaves. Where the slaves

in North America’s southern states shredded their hands picking cotton,

Caribbean slaves spent their days hacking through fields of sugar cane and

stoking the fires needed to transform the raw cane into molasses, sugar, and

rum. Sugar products soon became by far the most important of all of

colonial Britain’s food imports from the New World. Before the Caribbean

colonies started producing and exporting sugar in huge quantities, it was a

fashionable luxury consumed only in the grandest houses in Europe’s cities.

If ordinary folk had a hankering for something sweet they had to make do

with ripe fruit or, if they were lucky, a spoonful of honey.

But in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, as sugar became

more affordable, it was wolfed down in ever more prodigious quantities by

people who quickly learned that a warm cup of very sweet tea accompanied

by a slice of bread smeared with cheap, very sweet jam was a cost-effective

way to sustain them over a twelve-hour shift. Thus, by 1792, it was widely

accepted even by abolitionists like the attorney William Fox, who

campaigned for an end to plantation slavery in the Caribbean, that sugar

was no longer a “luxury, but has become by constant use a necessary of

life.” By the dawn of the twentieth century, per capita sugar consumption in

the United Kingdom was a tooth-rotting quarter of a pound every day,4 a

level of consumption that Britons maintained through to the twenty-first

century.

Sugar fueled the bodies of many workers during Britain’s Industrial

Revolution. But its factories, barges, railways, and ships were powered by

coal.

Some foragers had worked out that coal could be burned as fuel as long

as 75,000 years ago, and bronze-casters in ancient China made routine use

of it from around 4,600 years ago.5 But outside of East Asia few saw much

use for it until the invention of energy-hungry machines and engines. Coal

after all was not always easy to find. It was also hard, often dangerous,

work to mine, a challenge to transport, and, when burned, produced foul,

sulfurous smoke and a sticky black soot. More importantly, in most places

there was still more than enough wood around with which to make

domestic fires. The only places where coal ever rivaled wood as a domestic

fuel source were those where shallow deposits were easily accessed and

dense populations had already burned their way through most of the local

forests.6 Elsewhere it was only after steam engines came into widespread

use that coal and other fossil fuels became an important energy source. This

was not only because demand for combustible fuel sky-rocketed as people

became aware of its potential, but also because the first widespread use of

steam engines was to pump water from sodden coal pits, so making it

possible for miners to dig out more coal than they ever could before.

The first rudimentary steam engines were built long before any

Enlightenment scientists began to worry about how to measure how much

work these machines were capable of doing. Hero of Alexandria, an

engineer in Roman Egypt, built a simple spinning steam engine he called an

aelopile in the first century AD. But like the wind-powered music-making

organ he also built, he couldn’t think of a use for it other than making it

spin and whistle to entertain dignitaries at parties. Versions of this simple

pressurized steam turbine are still reproduced every year in thousands of

school classrooms.

Engineers in Ottoman Turkey and later in Renaissance France also

experimented with building rudimentary engines over a thousand years

later, but it was only when the English military engineer Thomas Savery

filed a patent in 1698 for “a new invention for raising of water and

occasioning motion to all sorts of mill work by the impellent force of fire”

that anyone put steam to serious use. His engines, nicknamed “miners’

friends,” were simple condensers with no moving parts. They drew water

upward by creating partial vacuums when hot steam cooled in sealed

chambers. They also had an annoying tendency to explode and shower their

operators with searing hot shrapnel. But they were powerful enough to

pump water from mine pits and so aid miners to retrieve more coal than the

tons they needed to burn to keep these desperately inefficient machines

running in the first place.

An aelopile—the first steam engine as described by Hero of Alexander in AD 50

Savery’s big, immobile engines earned him a hallowed place in the

history books. But perhaps because he persuaded the British Parliament to

extend his exclusive patent, it didn’t take long before others came up with

new, more effective engines based on different designs.

The most important new design was unveiled in 1712 by Thomas

Newcomen, an ironmonger who specialized in making equipment for coal

and tin miners. His engine powered a separate piston and as a result was far

more efficient and powerful than Savery’s. Even so, Newcomen’s engines

were also used mainly to pump water from coal mines and for providing

reusable water to drive waterwheels.

Versions of Newcomen’s engine remained in widespread use until 1776,

when James Watt, who had spent two decades experimenting with new

engine designs, realized that by keeping the condenser and the piston

separate he could build an even more efficient and versatile engine. Over

the course of the eighteenth century, fortunately for those who had to stoke

the fires of these engines, the widespread use of coal in foundries increased

the scale and quality of their iron output, so enabling the manufacture of

ever more precisely engineered and robust engines capable of operating at

higher pressures without exploding. As a result, the following century was

marked by the appearance and rapid adoption of successive new,

increasingly efficient, and versatile variants of Watt’s engine. From 1780,

stationary ones were installed in factories across Europe and used to drive

the sometimes bewilderingly complex systems of pulleys, levers, gears, and

winches that lined factory floors, while mobile ones powered an ever

speedier transportation infrastructure capable of moving big cargoes at what

a century earlier would have seemed like breakneck speeds.

The construction of at first dozens and then hundreds of large steam-

powered textile mills and factories between 1760 and 1840 created

thousands of new jobs for migrants to Britain’s cities and towns. But it did

not—at first—create very many new professions or trades. If anything, the

early years of the Industrial Revolution were marked by the mass culling of

a whole range of well-established and sometimes even ancient professions,

from weavers to farriers, while creating a handful of opportunities for a new

class of workers comprised of aspirant engineers, scientists, designers,

inventors, architects, and entrepreneurs, almost all of whom came from the

private school– and Oxford- and Cambridge-educated urban classes. For

those destined to work on the factory floors, actual skills were not on the

list of qualities that their employers wanted. What they required were

bodies that could be trained to operate their spinning jennys, water frames,

and power looms.

Life was hard even for those working for the most enlightened employers

—by the grim standards of the time—like Richard Arkwright. The inventor

of the spinning frame—a machine for binding thread—he established a

series of mills across the north of England between 1771 and 1792, was one

of the principal targets of the Luddite Rebellion, and is now often thought

of as “the inventor of the factory system.” Those who worked in his

factories were expected to perform six thirteen-hour shifts over the course

of a week, and any who showed up late were docked two days’ pay. He did

allow employees a week of annual vacation (unpaid) on the condition that

they did not leave town while taking it.

For the first few decades of the Industrial Revolution, and possibly for

the first time since ancient cities began to coalesce in the valley of the

Euphrates River, farmers had cause to feel better off than many city folk.

Where they breathed fresh air and drank mostly clean water, those in the

cities labored longer hours, ate poorly, breathed air fouled with smog, drank

dirty water, and endured diseases like tuberculosis—which accounted for up

to one-third of all recorded deaths in the UK between 1800 and 1850—that

raced through their crowded, perpetually coughing tenements. And even

though real wages for factory workers slowly crept up over the course of

the first half of the nineteenth century, the average height of both men and

women declined, along with their life expectancy.

But perhaps even more importantly, where farmers found at least some

immediate satisfaction from applying the skills they accumulated over a

lifetime to creatively solve problems on the farm each day, most factory

workers had to endure endless hours of mind-numbing, repetitive labor.

Fortunately for the factory owners, former farmers migrating to the cities

from the countryside were no strangers to hard work, and where they

couldn’t find adults to fill empty roles, or needed small bodies to work in

cramped spaces or nimble fingers to fix fiddly parts on big machines, there

were plenty of children who could be drafted in, as often as not from local

orphanages. Children were such compliant and versatile laborers that by the

turn of the nineteenth century, close to half of all Britain’s factory workers

were under the age of fourteen. But the routine exploitation of children in

factories was not universally approved of. As a result, the Factory Act

passed by His Majesty’s Government in 1820 prohibited factories from

employing children under the age of nine on a full-time basis. It was

subsequently amended in 1833 to require that all children between the ages

of nine and thirteen had to receive at least two hours of schooling every day,

and that children aged between thirteen and eighteen should not be required

to work daily shifts longer than twelve hours at a time.

The early decades of the Industrial Revolution may have been miserable for

those who found themselves in the mills and factories, but it did not take

long before this steam-powered wealth was translated into some measurable

benefits for them too.

At first, the immense new wealth created by industrialization accrued

mainly to those at the top and middle of the economic pile, further

entrenching inequality in an already class-obsessed society. But by the

1850s a proportion of it began to trickle down to those working on the

factory floors in the form of improved wages and better housing.

In the absence of any meaningful government interventions beyond

legislation like the Factory Act, this process was led by several very

wealthy factory owners in an early incarnation of what now would be

labeled “corporate social responsibility.” Some of them felt it was their

Christian duty to better support their workers, but most of them had realized

that in order for workers to be productive they also needed somewhere

adequate to live, enough food to eat, and sufficient income to afford an

occasional luxury. As new Lords of Commerce, they set out to emulate the

feudal aristocrats who came before them by spending a proportion of the

often eye-wateringly large fortunes they accrued on building mass housing

and public facilities for their workers within easy walking distance of their

factories and mills.

Economic data from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain is patchy

and researchers don’t all agree about how and when this began, but using

real wages—wages adjusted to take inflation into account—as a measure,

some economists have argued that in the seventy years after 1780, British

laborers saw their household incomes double. Others have insisted that the

data doesn’t support this.7 They argue that up until the 1840s, the only thing

factory workers would have noted growing were the deprivations and

miseries that were heaped upon them.8 Even so, there is no doubt that from

the middle of the nineteenth century, most factory and mill workers began

to notice a determined upward trend in the quality of their material lives,

and for the first time ever they had a little money to spend on the luxuries

that until recently had been the exclusive preserve of the middle and upper

classes.

It also marked the beginning of many people viewing the work they did

exclusively as a means to purchase more stuff, so closing the loop of

production and consumption that now sustains so much of our

contemporary economy. Indeed, for much of the following 200 years, labor

movements and later trade unions would focus almost all of their resources

on securing better pay for their members and more free time to spend it in,

rather than trying to make their jobs interesting or fulfilling.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, increasing

agricultural productivity, a corresponding increase in artisanal

manufacturing, and the import of exotic novelties like linens, porcelain,

ivory, ostrich feathers, spices, and sugar from the colonies sparked the

stirrings of a “consumer revolution” in the more prosperous parts of

Europe.

The embrace of conspicuous consumption was at first confined to the

aristocratic and well-to-do merchant classes, but as more and more people

became dependent on cash wages rather than the product of their own

labors, consumption became more influential in shaping both the fortunes

and the aspirations of what would later be referred to as the working

classes.

Of course, many of the new luxury items that fueled Europe’s consumer

revolution were things that were useful regardless of the status they

bestowed on their owner. Light cotton shirts were far more comfortable

than scratchy woolen vests, especially in the muggy summer months; a glug

of good-quality rum was far easier on the gut than a shot of backstreet gin

in a brothel; and ceramic crockery was far easier to clean and store than

plates rough-hewn from wood and pewter mugs, even if it was much more

delicate and so needed to be replaced more often. But many other luxury

items appealed exclusively to the pursuit of status. People wanted items for

no reason but because they wished to emulate others who had them. Thus

while aristocrats sought to emulate royalty, aspirant merchants and

members of the educated professional classes sought to emulate aristocrats,

tradesmen sought to emulate merchants, and those at the base of the pile

sought to emulate those in the middle.

It was no coincidence that clothing and textiles were the first mass-

produced items during Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Farmers historically

tended to think only about practicalities when they dressed up for a day’s

work, but urban dwellers, even in ancient cities, often dressed to impress.

After all, among the crowds in a busy urban plaza it is impossible to tell a

noble from a commoner if they both happen to be wearing identical outfits.

The tendency among lower classes and castes in cities the world over to

emulate those of higher social standing historically caused much fretting

and tutting among elites determined to maintain the optics of rank. Some

urban elites, like the extravagantly bewigged and sequinned courtiers who

strutted about the gardens in the Palace of Versailles during the reign of the

Sun King, Louis XIV, achieved this by adopting insanely elaborate and

expensive fashions that the poor could never hope to copy. Others, like the

Romans, did so by enacting laws that imposed restrictions on the kinds of

clothing that people from different classes might wear.

This was also the approach adopted across much of medieval Europe,

and was embraced with particular enthusiasm in status-obsessed England,

which from the reign of Edward III (1327–77) through to the Industrial

Revolution enacted a whole host of laws designed to prevent peasants and

merchants from acting as if they were nobility. These sumptuary laws were

often packaged in the populist language of economic nationalism. Thus a

1571 Act of Parliament, apparently enacted to support local wool

producers, weavers, and dyers in England, demanded that, with the

exception of hereditary nobles, all men and boys over six years of age had

to wear distinctive woolen caps every Sunday and all other holy days, thus

introducing the distinctive flat cap as an essential marker of class identity in

Britain, which endured all the way through to the twenty-first century when

it was cheerfully re-appropriated as a symbol of prosperity by hipsters.

The problem with sumptuary laws was that they were nearly impossible

to police, and often made aspirational folk even more determined to dress

like their “betters.” In late seventeenth-century Britain, this inspired a

thriving market for secondhand clothes abandoned by the upper classes. It

also persuaded some anguished aristocrats to dress down to distinguish

themselves from the rabble who were dressing up, much to the horror of

some continental visitors like the French abbé Jean le Blanc, who noted

caustically that in England “masters dress like their valets and duchesses

copy after their chambermaids.”9

Clothing may have been the most obvious and immediate signifier of

status outside of the home, but as Britain’s cities began to swell over the

course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, aspirant families sought

to emulate the wealthier classes within the home too. Homewares in

particular emerged as important signifiers of status, especially among

people living in the rows and rows of undifferentiated houses that were built

to accommodate urban migrants. Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for

ambitious entrepreneurs to begin to explore opportunities to mass-produce

things like affordable porcelain and ceramic homewares, mirrors, combs,

books, clocks, carpets, and all sorts of different kinds of furniture.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the desire of

poorer people in cities across Europe to consume what were once luxuries

enjoyed only by the very rich was just as influential in shaping the history

of work as the invention of technologies to exploit the energy in fossil fuels.

Without it, there would have been no markets for mass-produced items, and

without markets the factories would never have been built. It also rewrote

the rules by which much of the economy operated. The growth of Britain’s

economy increasingly came to depend on people employed in

manufacturing and other industries reinvesting their wages in the very same

products they and their factory workers manufactured.

When he was appointed the first ever lecturer in sociology at the University

of Bordeaux in 1887, Emile Durkheim was in no doubt that new fashions

were often quickly embraced by the poorer and more marginal hoping to

emulate the rich and powerful. He was also in no doubt that fashions were,

by their nature, ephemeral. “Once a fashion has been adopted by everyone,”

he noted, “it loses all its value.”10

Durkheim had good reason to be worried about the transience of

fashions, especially in the fickle world of academia where new voguish

theories came and went with the seasons. It was after all only five years

previously that as a freshly graduated student in his midtwenties he had set

out to convince the grandees of French and German intelligentsia that not

only was the study of society more than just an intellectual novelty, it also

merited being recognized as a science in its own right. As sociology’s self-

appointed architect, he saw in his own ambitions an echo of when, a century

earlier, Adam Smith had established economics. Coincidentally, like Smith,

many of Durkheim’s ambitions were also shaped by an abiding interest in

the “division of labor.” But unlike Smith, Durkheim was not especially

interested in trucking, trading, and bartering. Nor was he particularly

concerned with the economic efficiencies that might be achieved by

reorganizing production processes in factories. When he contemplated the

division of labor, he had a much broader vision of the role “work” played in

shaping both individual lives and society as a whole. And as far as he was

concerned, many of the challenges faced by people living in complex urban

societies had to do with the fact that in modern cities people did all sorts of

different kinds of work.

Durkheim believed that a crucial difference between “primitive” societies

and complex modern ones was that where simple societies operated like

rudimentary machines with lots of easily interchangeable parts, complex

societies functioned more like living bodies and were made up of lots of

very different, highly specialized organs that, like livers, kidneys, and

brains, could not be substituted for one another. Thus chiefs and shamans in

simple societies could simultaneously be foragers, hunters, farmers, and

builders, but in complex societies lawyers could not moonlight as surgeons

any more than admirals could moonlight as architects. Durkheim also

believed that people in primitive societies typically had a far stronger sense

of community and belonging than people in more complex urban ones, and

to this extent were happier and more sure of themselves. If everyone in a

primitive society performed interchangeable roles, he reasoned, then they

would be bound into a kind of “mechanical solidarity” that was easily

reinforced by shared customs, norms, and religious beliefs. He contrasted

this with life in modern urban societies, where people performed many,

often very different roles and so developed very different perspectives of

the world, and insisted that this not only made it harder to bind people

together but also induced a potentially fatal and always debilitating social

disease that he dubbed “anomie.”

Durkheim introduced the idea of anomie in his first book, The Division of

Labour in Society, but developed it much further in his second monograph

Suicide: A Study in Sociology, in which he aimed to show that suicide,

which at the time was widely thought to be a reflection of profound

individual failings, often had social causes and so presumably could also

have social solutions. He used the term to describe the feelings of intense

dislocation, anxiety, and even anger that drove people to behave antisocially

and, when desperate, perhaps take their own lives. When Durkheim

described anomie in this way he was trying to make sense of how the rapid

changes brought about by industrialization affected individual well-being.

He was particularly intrigued by the fact that, almost paradoxically, the

increase in prosperity that accompanied industrialization in France had

resulted in more suicides and greater social stress. This led him to conclude

that it was the changes associated with urbanization and industrial

development that were a major driver of anomie. An example he offered

was of traditional craftsmen whose skills were suddenly rendered redundant

by technological advances and who, as a result, lost their status as valuable,

contributing members of society, and were forced to endure lives robbed of

the purposefulness that their work once provided them. Durkheim not only

credited anomie with suicide, but also with a whole host of other social

problems that up to then were commonly attributed to bad character, like

crime, truancy, and antisocial behavior.

Durkheim believed that there was more to anomie than the sense of

profound individual dislocation arising out of the changes associated with

the Industrial Revolution. He insisted that anomie was characterized by

what he called the “malady of infinite aspiration,” a condition arising when

there are “no limits to men’s aspirations” because they “no longer know

what is possible and what is not, what is just and what is unjust, which

claims and expectations are legitimate and which are immoderate.”11

It was not his explicit intention, but in invoking the “malady of infinite

aspiration” he offered a strikingly original take on the problem of scarcity,

different from that used by economists. Where Adam Smith and generations

of economists after him were convinced that we would always be hostage to

infinite desires, Durkheim took the view that being burdened by

unattainable expectations was not normal but rather a social aberration that

arose only in times of crisis and change, when a society lost its bearings as

a result of external factors like industrialization. Times like those he was

living in.

As grim as his subject matter often was, a vein of undiluted optimism runs

through much of Durkheim’s writing. He believed that having diagnosed

the causes of anomie, it was just a matter of time before a social medicine

was devised strong enough to treat the malady of infinite aspirations. He

also believed that he was living through a unique period of transition, and

that in time people would adjust to life in the industrial age. In the

intervening period, he thought that the adoption of a benign form of

nationalism, like the gentlemanly loyalty he felt toward France, and

possibly also the establishment of trade guilds like ancient Roman collegia

that would provide harried urbanites with a sense of belonging and

community, might ease the malady of infinite aspiration.

In hindsight, it is clear that Durkheim was wrong to think that the malady

could be so easily cured. Anomie continues to be invoked time and time

again in analyses of social alienation arising from change, but few share

Durkheim’s optimism about a cure. There is good reason to think that by

the time of his death in 1917 Durkheim was no longer so certain of it either.

By 1914, the nationalism that he believed might cure people of anomie had

morphed into something altogether uglier, which in combination with the

boundless ambitions of Europe’s leaders, and courtesy of the new-found

capacity to mass-produce ever more destructive weapons, had plunged the

continent into the first war of the industrial age. The war soon claimed the

lives of many of Durkheim’s favorite students, and in 1915 the life of his

only son, André. Durkheim was shattered by the loss and died soon after

suffering a stroke in 1917.

Since then, the kind of stability that Durkheim imagined would

eventually settle in following industrialization has come to resemble just

another infinite aspiration that slips frustratingly further away whenever it

seems to be nearly in reach. Instead, as energy-capture rates have surged,

new technologies have come online and our cities have continued to swell,

constant and unpredictable change has become the new normal everywhere,

and anomie looks increasingly like the permanent condition of the modern

age.

TOP TALENT

“Hardly a competent workman can be found . . . who does not devote a

considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and

still convince his employer he’s going at a good pace,” Frederick Winslow

Taylor explained to a meeting of the American Society of Mechanical

Engineers in June 1903.1 He was lecturing them about the perils of the

“natural tendency of men to take it easy” or to “loaf” in the workplace, a

phenomenon he called “soldiering” because it reminded him of the half-

hearted efforts of military conscripts, who only ever showed ambition when

dodging unpleasant duties. He also explained how, through the rigorous

application of his “scientific method of management,” factory owners could

not only eliminate soldiering but also shave considerable time and costs

from their manufacturing processes. Costs that could be transformed into

profits.

Taylor, who was so highly strung that he had to strap himself into a

straitjacket to help him fall asleep at night,2 was anything but a loafer.

When he was not welding sheet metal, designing machine tools, preparing

reports, recommendations, and manuscripts, or conducting meticulous time-

and-motion studies, stopwatch in hand, he could be found playing tennis or

golf. He approached his leisure with the same frantic intensity he brought to

his work. He won the U.S. National Championship in tennis in 1881 and

then, nineteen years later, played golf for team USA in the 1900 Summer

Olympics. The son of well-to-do Quakers who traced their family back to

the Mayflower Pilgrims, Taylor eschewed the career path he was expected

to follow on leaving school. After declining the place he was offered at

Harvard, he showed up at the gates of the Enterprise Hydraulic Works in

Philadelphia to begin a four-year apprenticeship as a machinist.

Born in 1856, Taylor was part of the first generation of Americans to

grow up inhaling the sulfurous fumes emitted by big American factories.

By the time of his death in 1915, he was eulogized by the glassy-eyed titans

of industry like Henry Ford as the “father of the efficiency movement,” and

declared by management consultants to be the “Newton [or] Archimedes of

the science of work.”3

His legacy was viewed with mixed feelings by factory workers. Despite

the fact that he lobbied for workers to be paid a proper wage, to work

reasonable hours and take time off, his methods robbed them of what little

initiative they were free to exercise when performing their jobs. They also

gave far greater license to managers to meddle with what workers were

doing. A factory organized according to Taylor’s scientific method was a

workspace where patience, obedience, and the ability to lose oneself in the

metallic beat of the mechanical hammers in a forge were far better

qualifications than imagination, ambition, and creativity.

Like Benjamin Franklin before him, Taylor swore by the adage that “time

is money.” But where Franklin believed that time spent on any earnest

endeavor nourished the soul, Taylor saw no point in working inefficiently.

And where Franklin was content to be disciplined about time, Taylor was

determined to translate every second into profit, courtesy of the decimal

stopwatch he carried everywhere in his pocket.

Taylor was not greatly impressed by his colleagues during his

apprenticeship at Enterprise Hydraulic. Many “soldiered,” most cut corners,

and, to Taylor’s mind, even the most diligent among them were irritatingly

inefficient. When his apprenticeship came to an end, he was nevertheless

determined to remain on the factory floor and soon accepted the offer of a

job as a laborer in the machine shop at the Midvale Steel Works, a

manufacturer of high-spec alloy parts for military and engineering

applications. He liked it there, and the management liked him. He was

quickly promoted from a lathe operator to gang boss and eventually chief

engineer. It was there that he also began to conduct experiments with his

stopwatch, carefully observing and timing different tasks to see whether he

could shave a few seconds off various critical processes, and redesign job

roles to ensure that laborers would find it difficult to waste effort.

The same freedom that Taylor was granted to conduct his efficiency

experiments at Midvale would be denied to other similarly innovative and

ambitious individuals in workplaces that adopted his scientific management

technique. Instead, they’d be shackled to rigid, target-driven, repetitive

work regimes where innovation was prohibited and the most important role

of managers was to ensure that workers performed as they were instructed

to.

Taylor’s scientific method was based on breaking down any production

process into its smallest component elements, timing each of them,

evaluating their importance and complexity, and then reassembling the

process from top to bottom with a focus on maximizing efficiency. Some of

the solutions he proposed were as simple as changing where tools and

equipment were stored on a workbench to eliminate small but unnecessary

movements. Others were much more comprehensive and involved totally

reorganizing a production process or redesigning a factory. “It is only

through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best

implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this

faster work can be assured,” he explained in Scientific Management.

“Taylorism,” as it came to be called, was adopted in many workplaces,

but never more famously than at the Ford Motor Company. In 1903, Henry

Ford hired Taylor to assist him in developing a new production process for

the now iconic Model T Ford. The result of Ford and Taylor’s collaboration

was the transformation of the private motor vehicle from an ostentatious

luxury into an accessible, and very practical, symbol of success and good

hard work. Instead of having teams of skilled mechanics assemble vehicles

from start to finish, the vehicle’s chassis was shunted down a production

line, alongside which were stationed teams of workers who only ever

performed one relatively straightforward task. This meant that Ford did not

need to hire skilled mechanics. All he needed was anyone capable of

learning a few simple techniques and diligently following instructions. It

also meant he could produce more cars, faster and cheaper than before. He

cut down the production time of a single Model T Ford from twelve hours

to ninety-three minutes, and with that cut the price of them from $825 to

$575.

The stockholders and senior executives in the companies that adopted

Taylorism considered it a tremendous success. After all, it almost instantly

yielded greater productivity and glorious dividends. From the perspective of

workers on the factory floor, though, Taylorism was a mixed blessing. On

the positive side, as much as loafers set Taylor’s teeth on edge, he believed

that “first class workers” should be rewarded for their productivity. Taylor

thought that the reason that most people took jobs and went to work was,

fundamentally, for the financial rewards and the products they might

purchase with them. He thus insisted that workers should be incentivized by

taking some of the profits his efficiencies generated, and transforming them

into bigger paychecks and more time off to spend them.

Taylor, whose scientific management approach also helped lay the

foundation for “human resources management” as a corporate function,

firmly believed that you needed to find the right person for the right job.

One problem was that the right person for most of the non-managerial jobs

Taylor designed was someone with limited imagination, boundless patience,

and a willingness to obediently do the same repetitive tasks day in and day

out.

Taylor had many critics. Among the most outspoken was Samuel

Gompers, the charismatic president and founder of the American Federation

of Labor, an organization that lobbied on behalf of the many skilled-craft

unions in the United States, including cobblers, hatmakers, barbers,

glassblowers, and cigar makers. As a young immigrant to the tough streets

of New York, he learned how to roll cigars and had found great satisfaction

in the performance of what he considered to be a highly skilled and

satisfying craft. The problem with Taylorism as he saw it was not the profits

it generated for factory owners, but the fact that it robbed workers of the

right to find meaning and satisfaction in the work they did, by transforming

them into nothing more than “high speed automatic machines” that were

installed in factories as if they were “a cog or a nut or a pin in a big

machine.”4

Taylorism may have inspired much criticism from the likes of Gompers,

but just like the Luddites, Taylor’s critics were paddling against the

profitable tides of history. Thus in 2001, ninety years after it was first

published, Taylor’s Scientific Management was voted the most influential

management book of the twentieth century by members of the Institute of

Management. But had Taylor taken up the place he was offered at Harvard

and gone into law as he was expected to, instead of taking up his

apprenticeship at Enterprise Hydraulic, someone else would have assumed

the mantle of the high priest of the “efficiency movement.” Efficiency had

been in the air ever since the very first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution

—Adam Smith had already outlined the basic principles of the efficiency

movement in his Wealth of Nations—and by the nineteenth century factory

owners everywhere understood the correspondence between productivity,

efficiency, and profit, even if they hadn’t yet worked out the best means to

achieve it. Working hours for manual laborers in particular were declining

rapidly as productivity went up. Taylor’s genius was simply that he was the

first to approach the problem as methodically as a scientist might approach

an experiment in a laboratory. He was also the first to realize that in the

modern era most people went to work to make money rather than products,

and that it was the factories themselves that made actual things.

Charles Darwin’s friend and neighbor, Sir John Lubbock, 1st Baron

Avebury, was the very model of a modern Victorian gentleman. And like his

near contemporary, Frederick Winslow Taylor, he was also a very busy

man.

Lubbock, who died in 1913 at the age of seventy-nine, is now

remembered by anthropologists and archaeologists as the man who coined

the terms “Paleolithic” to describe Stone Age foragers and “Neolithic” to

describe the oldest farming cultures. But he ought to be remembered by

many others too, at least in the United Kingdom and its former colonies,

where one of his achievements is still celebrated on eight or more occasions

every year. As the Member of Parliament for Maidstone in Kent, John

Lubbock was the driving force behind Parliament’s adoption of the Bank

Holiday Act of 1871, as a result of which most Britons and citizens of

Commonwealth countries still enjoy public “bank holidays” every year.

“Saint Lubbock,” as he was affectionately known in the 1870s, was an

early and enthusiastic advocate of maintaining a good work–life balance.

“Work is a necessity of existence,” he explained, but “Rest is not idleness,”

because “to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day,

listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the

sky, is by no means a waste of time.”5

It is hard to imagine that someone as busy as Lubbock ever found the

time to surrender himself to the clouds. As well as being a Member of

Parliament, he won county colors for Kent playing cricket; played in the

losing team of the 1875 FA Cup Final in soccer; ran the family bank; was

the inaugural president of the UK’s Institute of Bankers; chairman of the

London County Council; a privy councilor to the Queen; president of the

Royal Statistical Society; vice chairman of the Royal Society; and president

of the Anthropological Institute. In addition to these roles, he somehow

found the time to research and write several well-received books. Some

were whimsical, like his two-volume The Pleasures of Life, in which he

expounded on the importance of rest, work, sport, and nature. Some, like

his meticulously researched treatises on British flora and insects, were

scientifically rigorous and judiciously argued. Others were more ambitious

still, and none more so than his most well-known work, Pre-historic Times,

as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of

Modern Savages, which was published in 1865 and for which he was

awarded a string of honorary degrees and other awards.

Reading Lubbock’s collected works, it is hard to avoid the conclusion

that he viewed banking and politics as odious duties but considered his

scientific work a worthy indulgence. It is also hard to avoid the sense that

his views on the relationship between work and leisure were shaped by the

fact that, had he chosen to, he could have lived in idle comfort, being

waited on by the brigades of liveried footmen, maids, cooks, gardeners, and

butlers who kept in good order the grand Italianate mansion and extensive

ornamental gardens at the 250-acre family estate, High Elms, just outside

London. Indeed, it takes a special form of privilege to be able to devote

several intensive months, as Lubbock once did, to trying to teach his

beloved pet poodle, Van, how to read.

Lubbock was not unusual in this regard. Like Darwin, Boucher de

Perthes, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Aristotle, and even the frenetic

Frederick Winslow Taylor, Lubbock’s most important achievements were

only possible because he was wealthy enough to afford to do exactly what

he wanted to. If he’d had to work the same hours as the staff who

maintained High Elms or the thousands of men, women, and children

laboring on farms and in the factories, he wouldn’t have had the influence

to push the Bank Holiday Act through Parliament, nor the time or energy to

study archaeology, play sports, or carefully document the habits of garden

insects.

When John Lubbock shepherded his Bank Holiday Act through the

committee chambers of Parliament in 1871, working conditions in British

factories and mills were unregulated, trade unions were banned, and, under

the Master and Servants Act, workers who were disrespectful to their

managers or who agitated for industrial action were subject to criminal

prosecution and potentially a lengthy spell in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons.

The only substantive regulations dealing with workers’ rights were those in

the Factory Act of 1833, which limited the workweek for women and for

children under the age of eighteen to sixty hours per week, but imposed no

restrictions on the number of hours that men might be required to work.

After the Bank Holiday Act had been passed in 1871, it would take another

128 years and the implementation of the European Union’s Working Time

directive in the late 1990s before any restrictions on male working hours

would enter Britain’s statute books. Even so, by 1870, the workweek for

most men and women employed in many factories had already declined

from around seventy-eight hours per week to around sixty, based on six ten-

hour shifts.

In a rare moment of self-pity, Lubbock wrote that great “wealth entails

almost more labor than poverty, and certainly more anxiety.”6 It was one of

several statements he made in his collected works suggesting that, like

many others of his background, he didn’t really understand the long hours

the working classes actually labored for, or how unpleasant much of their

work was. There is after all a considerable difference between spending a

day nodding off in one of the committee rooms of the House of Commons

interrupted by a four-course lunch with the Institute of Bankers, and

spending a fourteen-hour shift choking on sulfur and phosphorus fumes

while gluing boxes together in a freezing matchstick factory. In other

words, most people were grateful to Saint Lubbock not because he had won

them a little extra time to pursue their individual interests or hobbies, but

because he secured them an extra day a few times a year in which they

might rest their work-worn bodies and do as little as possible.

The passing of the Bank Holiday Act 1871 signaled a sea change in

attitudes regarding time off for workers. This process was hastened by the

legalization of trade unions later the same year, and, in 1888, the first

successful legal strike in British history, when the “matchgirls” working for

one of Britain’s largest match producers, Bryant and May, took to the streets

to protest about their toxic working conditions and demand an end to

fourteen-hour shifts.

Despite unions progressively growing in power and influence, working

hours still remained high and most people worked a six-day, fifty-six-hour

week until after the First World War came to an end in 1918. Then, courtesy

of a shift in social attitudes shaped by the carnage men witnessed on the

battlefields of the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, as well as

technological advances and a surge in productivity as a result of the

widespread adoption of Winslow Taylor’s scientific management

techniques, working hours declined quickly to around forty-eight hours per

week. Before another decade passed, with Henry Ford—who by then

employed close to 200,000 in his American factories, and nearly as many

again at his factories in European capitals, Canada, South Africa, Australia,

Asia, and Latin America—leading the way, the forty-hour week, based on

five eight-hour shifts and weekends off, became the norm in most big

manufacturing industries.

The Great Depression put further downward pressure on working hours

as companies cut production. This process spurred an embryonic “shorter

hours movement,” and very nearly persuaded the Roosevelt administration

to introduce the thirty-hour workweek into law in the form of the Black-

Connery 30-Hours Bill, which sailed through the Senate in 1932 with a

fifty-three to thirty majority. Pulled at the last minute when President

Roosevelt got cold feet, the bill was abandoned, and as the worst of the

Depression passed, hours crept steadily upward again. By the time Hitler’s

panzers rolled into Poland in the autumn of 1939, most employed

Americans were working thirty-eight-hour weeks again.

Apart from a rise in working hours during the Second World War,

between 1930 and 1980 the average workweek in the United States

remained fairly consistently between thirty-seven and thirty-nine hours per

week. This was two or three hours shorter than in almost every other

industrialized country. But in the last decades of the twentieth century, they

started to creep slowly upward again, while total hours worked in most

other industrialized countries slowly declined. Since 1980, average weekly

working hours in the United States have been broadly aligned with those of

Western European economies, but because of less generous provisions for

annual leave, most Americans work several hundred more hours over the

course of a year than people in equivalent jobs in countries like Denmark,

France, and Germany.

Changes in weekly working hours in the UK, USA, and France, 1870–2000

John Maynard Keynes’s belief that “the standard of life in progressive

countries” in 2030 would be between “four and eight times as high” as it

was in 1930 was based on the assumption that economic growth would

increase at a steady rate of around 2 percent every year. In 2007, Yale

economist Fabrizio Zilliboti revisited Keynes’s predictions. He calculated

that, based on growth rates, a fourfold increase in living standards had

already occurred by 1980, and that, assuming growth trends continued, by

2030 we would witness a “17 fold increase in the standard of living,

amounting to more than double Keynes’s upper bound.”7 As unevenly

distributed as wealth and income are, most people in industrialized

economies probably now meet something resembling the basic living

standards that Keynes had in mind when he imagined that “absolute needs”

would be adequately met. In the United States, for instance, median net

wealth of households in 2017 was $97,000.8 That is three times higher than

it was in 1946 but a good deal less than it was in 2006, just before the

subprime crisis sent the global economy into a tailspin. Median household

wealth then was in the region of six times higher than in 1946.9 Tellingly, it

is also only roughly one-seventh of the average household net worth in the

United States, a number skewed upward by high levels of inequality.

But working hours have not declined as Keynes predicted. Indeed,

despite labor productivity in industrialized nations having risen roughly

four- or five-fold since the end of the Second World War, average weekly

working hours everywhere have continued to gravitate toward an average of

just under forty hours per week, and then remain stubbornly stuck there.

Economists have long debated why working hours have remained so

stubbornly high, but most agree that one part of the answer is reflected in

the story of what remains the world’s bestselling cereal brand.

Every year an estimated 128 billion bowls of Kellogg’s breakfast cereals are

fed into hundreds of millions of hungry mouths. The Kellogg’s brand is

synonymous with a cast of cheerful spoon-wielding cartoon characters who

grin from its packaging and commercials. None of these characters much

resemble their founding ancestor, John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-Day

Adventist with a rebellious streak, a passion for healthy living, and a

pathological hatred of anything to do with sex. An advocate for universal

circumcision because he believed it might dissuade boys from

masturbating, he invented a small range of breakfast cereals designed

specifically to curb the passions of the patients who attended the Battle

Creek Sanatorium, the vegetarian “wellness” retreat he established in 1886.

His cereals were not intended to be particularly tasty. John Harvey

Kellogg was of the view that spicy, rich, and sweet food induced unwanted

sexual urges but that plain food calmed them. Corn flakes, which he

patented in 1895, were developed specifically as a sexual turn-off.

It turned out that Kellogg’s sanatorium patients liked his crispy cereals

anyway. They were a welcome relief from the austere plates of unsalted

vegetables they were served for their other meals. But John Harvey Kellogg

wasn’t interested in commercializing his cereals. It was left to one of his

adopted sons, Will Kellogg, who did not share his father’s puritanical

views, to transform Kellogg’s cereals into a globally recognized brand. He

added some sugar to the old man’s recipes and then in 1906 began to mass-

produce his cereals. He also added some sugar to the marketing campaign.

To dispel any lingering idea that his product might curb his customers’ sex

drive, his first big campaign for corn flakes encouraged young men to wink

suggestively at pretty grocers.

Over the next forty years, Will Kellogg revolutionized food production in

the United States. A serial innovator, he experimented with and applied all

the latest trends in management, production, and marketing, including

Taylorism. By the 1920s, his company and its principal product were a

household name in the United States and it would not take long before it

expanded internationally.

When the Great Depression struck in 1929, Kellogg’s was already a big

employer. At the time, its only real rival in the mushrooming breakfast

cereal market was Post, who did what many other businesses still do in

times of economic uncertainty. They cut back on all non-essential spending

and took inventories of paper clips, staples, and ink as part of the effort to

maximize cash. Kellogg took a very different approach. He doubled his

advertising and ramped up production. It was a successful strategy. It turned

out that people liked to eat cheap, sugary, crunchy grains soaked in milk

when times were hard and his profits soared while shareholders in Post

learned not to hold their breath waiting for any dividends.

Kellogg did something else that was unusual. He cut full-time working

hours at his factories from an already reasonable forty hours a week to a

comfortable thirty hours a week, based on five six-hour shifts. By doing

this, he was able to create an entire shift’s worth of new full-time jobs in a

period when up to a quarter of Americans were unemployed. It seemed a

sensible thing to do for other reasons too. By the 1930s, American workers

were already lobbying for shorter working hours after companies like

Henry Ford’s had successfully introduced weekends and five-day weeks

with no noticeable dip in productivity (if anything, there was an increase in

profitability), and so Kellogg believed that his thirty-hour week was putting

him on the right side of a historical trend. It turned out to be the right thing

to do for Kellogg’s bottom line as well. Production-halting work-related

accidents became far more infrequent, and his operating overheads declined

so much that in 1935 Kellogg boasted in a newspaper article that “we can

[now] afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.”

Until the 1950s, the thirty-hour week remained the norm at Kellogg’s

factories. Then, somewhat to the surprise of management, three-quarters of

Kellogg’s factory staff voted in favor of returning to eight-hour shifts and a

forty-hour week. Some of the workers explained that they wished to return

to an eight-hour day because the six-hour shifts meant they spent too much

time getting under the feet of irritable spouses back at home. But most were

clear: they wanted to work longer hours to take home more money, to

purchase more or better versions of the endless procession of constantly

upgraded consumer products coming on to the market during America’s

affluent postwar era.10

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, war-weary Americans set about building

Chevrolet Bel-Airs instead of tanks, converting their accumulated

munitions piles into nitrogen-based fertilizers, and repurposing their radar

technology into microwave ovens. This nourished a newly reconfigured

American dream set against a background of ice cream in the home freezer,

TV dinners, and fast-food-fueled annual interstate vacations. Labor union

membership was at an all-time high and the peace dividend from “the war

to end all wars” was nurturing an ever-expanding and more prosperous

middle class.

This prosperity convinced John Kenneth Galbraith, the Canadian-born

Professor of Economics at Harvard, that advanced economies like the

United States’ were already sufficiently productive to meet the basic

material needs of all their citizens and hence that the economic problem as

defined by John Maynard Keynes had, more or less, been solved. He

expressed this sentiment in his most famous book, The Affluent Society,

which was published to great acclaim in 1958.

Galbraith was a towering figure of American economic history and not

just because, at six foot eight, he rarely encountered anyone who could stare

him in the eye. By the time of his death in December 2007, in addition to

his decades-long professorship at Harvard he was the most widely read

economist of the twentieth century, having sold more than 7 million books.

He also served as the editor of Fortune magazine for several years, and

assumed a variety of high-profile roles in the Roosevelt, Kennedy, and

Clinton administrations. But Galbraith did not consider himself an

economist in the traditional mold. Neither did he hold his chosen field of

study in particularly high esteem. Galbraith, who once described economics

as principally being “extremely useful as a form of employment for

economists,” accused his colleagues of using unnecessary complexity to

disguise the banality of their art, especially when it came to matters like

monetary policy.11 The son of a farmer, his entry into economics came by

way of his early ambitions to run the biggest and best shorthorn cattle ranch

in his home province of Ontario. To that end he acquired two degrees in

agricultural economics. Along the way he also developed forthright views

about the fundamental relationship between primary production, like

agriculture, and the rest of the economy.

In The Affluent Society, Galbraith sketched out a picture of post-war

America in which material scarcity had already ceased to be the primary

driver of economic activity. The United States, he observed, had become so

productive since the war that “more die . . . of too much food than of too

little.” Nevertheless, he reckoned that the United States was not making

particularly good use of its wealth. “No problem has been more puzzling to

thoughtful people than why, in a troubled world, we make such poor use of

our affluence,” he wrote.

One of the main reasons that Galbraith took this view was post-war

Americans’ seemingly limitless appetite for purchasing things they didn’t

need. Galbraith believed that by the 1950s most Americans’ material

desires were as manufactured as the products they purchased to satisfy

them. Because most people’s basic economic needs were now easily met, he

argued, producers and advertisers conspired to invent new artificial needs to

keep the hamster wheel of production and consumption rolling rather than

investing in public services. Real scarcity, in other words, was a thing of the

past.

Galbraith may have considered advertising a modern phenomenon, but the

manufacture of desire is at least as old as the first cities. In ancient

metropolises, advertising took many forms familiar to us now, from the

seductive pornographic tableaus that decorated the walls of brothels in

Pompeii to elegantly printed handbills and flyers emblazoned with cute

logos and snappy slogans distributed by craftspeople in Song Dynasty

China. But until recently advertising was something most people did for

themselves. That all changed with mass-circulation newspapers.

In the United States, the birth of advertising as a revenue-generating

industry in its own right is now often credited to none other than Benjamin

Franklin. In 1729, after purchasing the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin

struggled to turn a profit through sales alone, and wondered whether he

might defray the costs by selling space in the paper to local traders and

manufacturers wanting to drum up new business. His plan did not work at

first, as no one was convinced that forking out good money to a local

newspaper would be of much use. Cash-strapped, Franklin tried a different

approach and prominently advertised one of his own inventions, the

Franklin Stove, to see if that would help. Doing so won him a double

victory. Sales of the Franklin Stove surged and other tradesmen soon took

notice and purchased advertising space in the Pennsylvania Gazette, so

earning Franklin a new income stream and an esteemed place in America’s

Advertising Hall of Fame.12 Other newspapers and magazines quickly

followed Franklin’s lead, but it would take another century before the first

proper advertising agencies—businesses focused purely on designing and

then placing advertisements in newspapers on behalf of clients—would be

formed.

The exalted position of advertising in global commerce was ultimately

enabled by industrialization. For much of the century after Franklin’s

marketing experiments, most advertisements were dull, informative, and

aimed exclusively at local people. But this changed with the embrace of

mass production, as entrepreneurs with grand ambitions realized that if they

were to access markets beyond their hometowns they would need to

advertise. They also realized that they needed to differentiate themselves

from local suppliers of similar products, with the result that advertisers

began to focus more and more on catching readers’ eyes with snappy

slogans in different fonts, and on adding pictures. By the 1930s, advertising

was as important to marquee brands like Kellogg’s and Ford as any part of

their operations. As Henry Ford famously commented, “Stopping

advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.”

In making the case that America’s affluence was being squandered by the

alliance between manufacturers and advertisers, Galbraith was not setting

his sights on the likes of Kellogg’s or even the Ford Motor Company. To his

mind, they at least made useful products. His animosity was toward those

he believed were manipulating people’s aspirations, exploiting their

anxieties about status, and exalting their “relative needs.”

When Galbraith published The Affluent Society, the long-lunch and

lounge-suit era of advertising was shifting up a gear as advertisers realized

the unprecedented power of television to pump messages directly into

people’s homes and workplaces. It was just over a decade since the agency

N. W. Ayer had come up with what is now widely regarded as the most

influential advertising tagline in United States’ history, “a diamond is

forever.” This almost single-handedly created the association between

eternal love and diamonds in the world’s richest luxury market, established

the convention of men marking their engagements with the gift of a

diamond solitaire ring to their fiancée, and in doing so created sustained

demand for a product that hardly anyone before 1940 cared much about at

all. By the late 1950s, diamond rings became so ubiquitous that Galbraith

remarked, “Once a sufficiently impressive display of diamonds could create

attention even for the most obese and repellent body, for they signified

membership in a highly privileged caste. Now the same diamonds are

afforded by a television star or a talented harlot.”

For Galbraith, advertising served another counterintuitive purpose

beyond keeping the cycle of production and consumption rolling. He

thought it made people worry less about inequality because, as long as they

were able to purchase new consumer products once in a while, they felt that

they were upwardly mobile and so closing the gap between themselves and

others.

“It has become evident to conservatives and liberals alike,” he noted

drily, “that increasing aggregate output is an alternative to redistribution or

even to the reduction of inequality.”13

This should have all changed in the 1980s, after what some analysts now

refer to as the “Great Decoupling” took effect.

It didn’t.

For much of the twentieth century, there was a relatively stable

relationship between labor productivity and wages in the United States and

other industrialized countries. This meant that as the economy grew and

labor output increased, the amount of money people took home in their

paychecks grew at a similar rate. While this meant that richer people took

home a larger net slice of the profits, at least everybody felt that as the

companies employing them got richer, so did they.

In 1980, though, that relationship broke down. In the “Great

Decoupling,” productivity, output, and gross domestic product all continued

to grow, but wage growth for all but the highest paid stalled. Over time,

many people started to notice that their monthly wages didn’t stretch as far

as they used to, despite the fact that they were doing the same jobs they had

in the same, profitable, businesses.

Graph showing real GDP per capita in the USA nearly doubles between 1980 and 2015 but real

median incomes stagnate14

The Great Decoupling killed off any lingering downward pressure on the

length of the workweek. Most people simply couldn’t afford to maintain

their lifestyles by working fewer hours. Many took on lots more personal

and household debt, which conveniently enough at the time was very cheap.

Among the better paid segments of the workforce, it encouraged a net rise

in hours worked, as the potential rewards for “top achievers” suddenly went

through the roof.

It is not yet clear what caused the Great Decoupling. Some economists

even dispute that it happened. They argue that the stark graphs indicating a

clear divergence between productivity and median real wages are inaccurate

because they don’t account for the rising costs of incidental benefits paid to

U.S. employees, mainly in the form of ballooning health insurance bills,

and because standard methods for measuring inflation don’t capture the real

picture.

For many others, though, the Great Decoupling was the first clear

evidence that technological expansion was cannibalizing the workforce and

concentrating wealth in fewer hands. They point out that in 1964, the

telecom giant AT&T was worth $267 billion in today’s dollars and

employed 758,611 people. This works out at roughly one employee to every

$350,000 of value. Today’s communications giant, Google, by contrast, is

worth $370 billion and has only around 55,000 employees, which works out

at roughly $6 million of value per employee.

The process was facilitated by a series of important political

developments. There was the deregulation of markets and “trickle-down

economics” championed by Thatcher and Reagan, as well as, later, the

collapse of Communism and the embrace of oligarchy capitalism in the

former Soviet Republics, and the rise of the Southeast Asian “tiger

economies” spurred by China’s embrace of state capitalism.

When John Maynard Keynes plotted the course to his economic

promised land, he imagined that it would be the “strenuous purposeful

money-makers”—the ambitious CEOs and moneymen—who would pilot us

all there. But he also believed that as soon as we arrived, “the rest of us will

no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them.”

In this, he was wrong.

In 1965, chief executives in the top 350 U.S. firms took home roughly

twenty times the pay of an “average worker.”15 By 1980, CEOs in the same

top bracket of firms took home thirty times the annual salary of an average

worker, and by 2015, that number had surged to just shy of three hundred

times. Adjusted for inflation, most U.S. workers gained a modest 11.7

percent rise in real wages between 1978 and 2016, while CEOs typically

enjoyed a 937 percent increase in remuneration.

The surge in senior executives’ pay was not only a U.S. phenomenon. In

the two decades before the Great Recession in 2007, big companies

everywhere were persuaded that to attract and retain “top talent” they had to

offer exorbitant pay packages.

Changes in household income, USA, 1945–201516

It was the global consultancy firm McKinsey & Company who started

the hysteria. In 1998, they introduced the word “talent” to the ever growing

lexicon of corporate speak when they headlined one of their Quarterly

briefings to clients and potential clients “The War for Talent.”17 These

windy, slogan-ridden advertorials were designed to persuade businesses to

spend hard cash on soft services they usually didn’t need. Most sat unread

in executive inboxes or merited, at most, a casual scan in a bathroom stall.

Aware of the short attention span of most of their readers, McKinsey

peppered their briefings with eye-catching subheadings. On this particular

advertorial, these would not have been out of place in dispatches from a

journalist in a war zone.

“There is a war on talent, and it will intensify,” proclaimed one. “All are

vulnerable,” warned another.

Typically condescended to as junior partners by their peers in charge of

“core” corporate functions such as finance, supply chains, and marketing,

unloved and under-appreciated human resources directors in the world’s big

companies found this briefing manna from heaven. It offered them

something they could happily put in front of their colleagues, boards, and

CEOs that wouldn’t induce them to roll their eyes and yawn, because this

briefing said the difference between good and bad companies was not the

processes they followed or how efficient they were, but the clever people

steering those businesses. Senior executives just like them.

The beating heart of the briefing was a graph, which McKinsey labeled

ominously “Exhibit 1.” It indicated that some demographers associated with

the United Nations guessed that in two years’ time the number of thirty-five

to forty-four-year-olds in the United States would start to stabilize at some

15 percent lower than its anticipated peak. In hindsight, this prediction was

hokum. But the conclusions that they drew from it—that the boards of top

businesses ought to be scrapping ruthlessly with one another to retain the

talents of a handful of competent senior executives—was an outrageous

stretch at best. It took no cognizance of trends in education, or the fact that

every year more graduates and MBAs were entering the job market. Nor did

it mention immigration, or that in the ever more globalized marketplace for

senior executives, talent could be sourced from almost anywhere regardless

of local demographic trends.

To future historians, the “war for talent” may appear to be one of the

most elaborate corporate conspiracies of all time. Future economists might

simply regard this as a market bubble as irrational and inevitable as any that

came before or since. But others, who recognize that most of the rest of us

are also suckers for flattery, may view it more sympathetically. After all,

those who benefited from the surge in remuneration greatly appreciated the

reassurance that they were worth every penny they were paid. Indeed, like

urban elites through history who justified their elevated status relative to

others in terms of their noble blood, their heroism, or their proximity to the

gods, these “masters of the universe” were convinced they were where they

were because of merit.

The team from McKinsey & Company who drafted the viral Quarterly

sniffed another opportunity. They promptly transformed it into a

resoundingly hollow but nevertheless top-selling business book,

unsurprisingly enough also titled The War for Talent. Other big consultancy

firms soon got in on the act and human resources managers everywhere

watched their departments transform from dull administrative service

providers into bells-and-whistles, make-or-break, core corporate functions

that merited seats at the top table of the world’s great firms.

It did not take very long for some observers to declare the talent narrative

to be nonsense. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, published an article called

“Fighting the War for Talent is Hazardous to Your Organization’s Health.”18

In it he made the seemingly obvious point that businesses succeed because

they are collaborative, and that overvaluing individuals was likely to create

a corrosive culture. Soon afterward, in a 2002 issue of the New Yorker,

Malcolm Gladwell delivered an eviscerating critique on what he dubbed

“The Myth of Talent.” He took the view that the whole thing had been

kicked off by overpaid McKinsey executives buying into the myth of their

own brilliance. He also implicated McKinsey and their talent mindset in

creating the toxic culture that brought down one of their favored clients,

Enron—which had filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and was keeping the fraud

investigators who would later send some of the executives to prison very

busy.19

As persuasive as they were, Pfeffer’s and Gladwell’s protests were

drowned out by the sounds of tills ringing as stock markets and commodity

prices surged everywhere. This, however, had very little to do with the “top

talent.” Rather it was made possible by a billion new customers in

Southeast Asia embracing consumerism, and because, in the United States

and Europe, recently deregulated and rapidly expanding banks had

persuaded themselves and governments that the clever algorithms they used

to fragment and then bury rotten assets had finally brought an end to “boom

and bust economics”—the cycle of collapses and recessions that punctuated

the upward trajectory of economic growth over the course of the twentieth

century. And even if they couldn’t quite understand how they managed this,

they nevertheless flooded the market with cheap debt so that people could

carry on spending even when their bank balances were deep in the red.

When over the course of 2008 and 2009 stock markets collapsed, industrial

commodity prices tumbled, and panicked Central Banks started to

frantically print trillions of dollars to recapitalize teetering economies, it

seemed for a brief moment that the inflated salaries and stupendous bonuses

won by senior executives in big corporations were a bubble due to burst in

spectacular fashion. It also appeared the public would lose faith in the

brilliance of “top talent” when the financial crisis revealed that their Midas

touch only ever produced mountains of fool’s gold.

But the bubble didn’t burst. The talent narrative was by then so deeply

embedded in the institutional fabric of even the most vulnerable businesses

that, as they started retrenching staff and closing operations to cut costs,

many simultaneously dipped into their meager cash reserves to allocate

large retention bonuses to their senior leadership team on the assumption

that only they would be able to navigate a way through the newly

treacherous waters.

Even if many of those at the very top somehow managed to engineer

greater rewards for themselves, the crash did precipitate a sharp decline in

public confidence in economists. If the so-called experts hadn’t seen the

crisis coming, then there was good cause to question their expertise. The

problem was that because economics had masqueraded as a science for so

long, people quite reasonably began to treat expertise in general with more

skepticism, even in far more solidly grounded sciences like physics and

medicine. As a result, among the more unexpected casualties of the

financial crisis was the once near-universal confidence in people like

climate scientists warning of the dangers of anthropogenic climate change

and epidemiologists trying to explain the benefits of immunization.

The only disciplined message put out by the impromptu coalition of

dreamers and discontents who “occupied” Wall Street and other global

financial capitals in the wake of the financial crisis was something along the

lines of “burn the rich.” But their efforts to highlight inequality didn’t do

much to change public perceptions. Numerous subsequent research projects

have revealed that people in the most unequal countries routinely

underestimate the levels of inequality, while those in countries where the

bulk of national wealth is in the hands of large middle classes tend to be

more accurate and occasionally even overestimate inequality.20 The gap

between reality and perception is particularly extreme in the United States

where material inequality is the most acute it has been for half a century.21

There, surveys revealed that even after the crash most laypeople

underestimated the pay ratio between bosses and unskilled workers by more

than a factor of ten.22

The enduring public illusion of greater material equality in places like the

United States and the United Kingdom is in part a testament to the

perseverance of the idea that there is a clear, even meritocratic,

correspondence between wealth and hard work. Thus, while those who are

very wealthy like to believe that they are worthy of the financial rewards

they have accrued, many poorer people don’t want to mess with the dream

that they too might achieve such riches if only they work hard enough. For

them to concede that perhaps the system was stacked against them—that

money had become far better at begetting more money than working long

hard shifts—would be tantamount to abandoning their sense of agency and

their cherished beliefs that what made their countries different was that

anyone who worked hard enough could be whatever they wished to be.

Perceptions about inequality and its causes in places like the United

States now cleave closely to whether people identify themselves as

progressives or conservatives. Thus following their 2019 survey on

attitudes to wealth and welfare, the Cato Institute notes that “strong liberals

say the top drivers of wealth are family connections (48%), inheritance

(40%), and getting lucky (31%) and strong conservatives say the top drivers

of wealth are hard work (62%), ambition (47%), self-discipline (45%), and

risk-taking (36%).”23

Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that at least some of the

anxiety and social media–amplified polarization over the past decade is

attributable to people coalescing around different schools of thought about

how to manage the extraordinary economic and social changes automation

is visiting upon us. Thus on one side, there are those who advocate

nativism, economic nationalism, and a return to what they consider to be

transcendent virtues based variously on religious dogma and ideas like hard

work. On the other side, there are progressives embracing a far more

transformative agenda, even if it is not yet clear what that is.

But political polarization is by no means the only growing pain

exacerbated by anxieties about the future in urban, industrialized

economies, where for many the boundaries between our professional and

personal lives have all but disappeared.

THE DEATH OF A SALARYMAN

Among the small group of newspaper correspondents, stringers, and

freelancers who get a buzz documenting life and death in war zones, the

risk of catching a stray bullet, being kidnapped by shouty people in

balaclavas, or blown up are all part of the job. Journalists who work to

expose (or bury) the dirty secrets of the powerful, who dig into the dark

hearts of criminal networks, or who traffic in opinions intended to provoke,

upset, and outrage, also accept that there is a chance their work might put

them in harm’s way. But for most, journalism is meant to be a safe

profession. No journalist, for example, expects to die in the course of

reporting on traffic congestion, the ebb and flow of financial markets, when

reviewing the latest gadgetry and fashion trends, or while documenting the

dull battles that shape city-hall micro-politics.

Tragically, this expectation was confounded for Miwa Sado, a reporter

for NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster. Her beat was local government and on

July 24, 2013, while covering the metropolitan elections in Tokyo, she died

in the line of duty and her body was found with her mobile phone still

clasped in her hand.

Doctors soon established that Miwa Sado died as a result of congenital

heart failure. But following an investigation by Japan’s Ministry of Labor,

the official cause of her death was changed to “karoshi”: death by

overwork. In the month preceding her death, Sado had clocked an

exhausting 159 hours of official overtime. That was equivalent to working

two full eight-hour shifts every weekday over a four-week period.

Unofficially, the number of hours of overtime probably exceeded that. In

the weeks following her death, her grieving father trawled through her

phone and computer records. He calculated that she had worked at least 209

hours of overtime in the month preceding her death.

Sado’s death was one among many similar reported that year. The

Japanese Ministry of Labor officially recognizes two categories of death as

a direct consequence of overworking. Karoshi describes such a death as a

result of cardiac illness attributable to exhaustion, lack of sleep, poor

nutrition, and lack of exercise, as in Sado’s case. Karo jisatsu describes

when an employee takes their own life as a result of the mental stresses

arising from overworking. At the end of the year, the Ministry of Labor

certified that 190 deaths occurred over the course of 2013 as a result of

either karoshi or karo jisatsu, with the former outnumbering the latter two

to one. This was roughly in line with the average annual numbers for the

preceding decade. But Japan’s Ministry of Labor will only ever declare a

death by karoshi or karo jisatsu under exceptional circumstances, and when

it can be proved beyond doubt that the worker has dramatically exceeded

reasonable limits for overtime, and that there were no other significant

contributing factors (like severe hypertension). As a result, some, like

Hiroshi Kawahito, the secretary general of Japan’s National Defense

Counsel for Victims of Karoshi—one of a host of anti-karoshi organizations

in Japan—insists that the government is reluctant to embrace the true scale

of the problem.1 He takes the view that the real numbers are ten times

higher. Unsurprisingly, the number of people who suffer severe mental or

health disorders as a result of overwork in Japan are thought to be many

orders of magnitude higher again. As are the number of people who cause

workplace accidents as a consequence of being exhausted while on the job.

In 1969, the first case of karoshi was officially acknowledged after a

twenty-nine-year-old clerk in the shipping department of a major Japanese

newspaper keeled over and perished at his desk after logging eye-watering

amounts of overtime. The term soon entered the popular lexicon and

increasingly became a prominent part of the national conversation as more

and more deaths were attributed directly to overwork. It was added to an

already growing vocabulary of work-related ailments specific to Japan,

most notably “kacho-byo,” which translates to “manager’s disease” and was

coined to describe the overwhelming stress felt by middle managers over

promotions, letting down their team, shaming themselves and their families,

or, worse still, disappointing their bosses and weakening the company. But

where kacho-byo is a problem that only afflicts white-collar workers,

karoshi is an equal-opportunity killer that preys as eagerly on blue-collar

workers as it does on managers, teachers, healthcare workers, and CEOs.

Japan is not the only Southeast Asian country where the potentially fatal

consequences of overwork are contemplated by stressed-out employees

hastily eating lunch at their workstations. South Koreans, who work on

average 400 more hours per year than Britons or Australians, have adopted

a form of the Japanese word karoshi2 to describe the same phenomenon. So

too have the Chinese. Since China’s cautious embrace of “state capitalism”

in 1979, their economy has grown at breakneck speed and doubled in size

roughly every eight years. And while technology has played a big role,

China’s growth has been catalyzed by a disciplined and affordable labor

force that has hoovered up manufacturing operations from businesses across

the globe, and transformed China into the world’s largest producer and

exporter of manufactured goods. But one of the unintended consequences of

this has been a surge in the number of people whose deaths have been

attributed to overwork. In 2016, CCTV, the state broadcaster, which usually

only resorts to hyperbole when they have good news to share, announced

that more than half a million Chinese citizens die from overworking every

year.3

According to official statistics, working hours in South Korea, China, and

Japan have declined considerably over the last two decades, with the

greatest strides being taken in South Korea. This shift has been credited in

part to the advocacy of anti-karoshi groups pushing for a more harmonious

work–life balance. In Japan in 2018, for example, the average worker

officially clocked around 1,680 hours of work, 141 hours fewer than in

2000. This is close to 350 more hours per year than German workers but

500 less than Mexican workers. It is also below the average for the world’s

elite club of nations nominally committed to free trade, the Organisation for

Economic Co-operation and Development.4 But there is also a well-

established culture of under-reporting working hours in Japan, China, and

South Korea, and survey data of employees suggest that for many work

remains as all-dominating as it ever was. Nothing perhaps reveals this better

than the fact that despite a well-funded government campaign in Japan to

persuade people to go on holiday once in a while, since the turn of the

millennium most Japanese workers still take fewer than half the total days

of fully paid leave offered them.5

China’s Department of Population and Employment Statistics6 reported

in 2016 that urban workers routinely perform close to an hour of overtime

every day, with around 30 percent of workers exceeding the baseline forty-

hour week by at least eight hours. Among the hardest working of this group

were “business service personnel” and “production, transport, equipment

operators,” with over 40 percent clocking in more than forty-eight hours of

labor every week. But the likelihood is that the real figures are much higher

than reported.

While those living in largely rural areas still work to a more manageable

rhythm, for the private-sector workers in buzzing urban hubs like

Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing, long hours are now par for

the course. This is especially so for those working in China’s frenetic high-

technology sector, led by companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and

Huawei. They now order their working lives according to the mantra “996.”

The two 9s refer to the requirements to put in twelve-hour days, from 9 a.m.

to 9 p.m., and the 6 refers to the six days of the week that employees with

ambitions to get anywhere are expected to be at their workstations.

The stress fractures and thickening of the work-worn bones of farming

peoples show that ever since some of our ancestors substituted their bows

and digging sticks for plows and hoes, death by overwork has been a thing.

Besides the many who through history have died while “trying to save the

farm,” there are the countless souls who were worked to death under whips

held by others: the slaves that ancient Romans dispatched to their mines and

quarries; the descendants of the men and women stolen from Africa who

led hard, abbreviated, and brutalized lives in the cotton and sugar

plantations of the Americas; the tens of millions who perished in twentieth-

century gulags, labor colonies, prisons, and concentration camps as a result

of committing crimes or finding themselves on the wrong side of one or

another -ocracy, -ism, or ego; and those who, like the rubber harvesters in

King Leopold’s Congo or along the Putamoyo River in Colombia at the turn

of the twentieth century, were viewed as little more than a disposable mass

of cheap laborers.

But what makes the individual stories of karoshi and karo jisatsu

different from these is the fact that what drove the likes of Miwa Sado to

lose or take their lives was not the risk of hardship or poverty but their own

ambitions refracted through the expectations of their employers.

The convergence of the modern pursuit of riches with a Confucian ethic

of responsibility, loyalty, and honor may account for the high numbers of

deaths by overwork in cities like Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo, but death by

overwork is not a phenomenon that is unique to late twentieth- and early

twenty-first-century Southeast Asia. Indeed, what is perhaps unique about

the Confucian belt economies in this respect is not that death by overwork

is more common there than anywhere else, but the fact that people there are

more willing to engage with it as a problem.

In Western Europe and North America, deaths by overwork are usually

attributed to individual failings rather than the actions or failings of an

employer or their government. As a result, they don’t form part of the

national conversation, or feature in news headlines, or result in grieving

relatives demanding abject apologies from employers or action by

governments. Even so, occasionally the problem has generated some

profile. Over the course of the last decade, for instance, the CEO of France

Telecom was forced to step down and several senior managers were put on

trial charged with “moral harassment,” as a consequence of the toxic

working culture they instilled at the company and that prosecutors insisted

contributed to thirty-five suicides among staff members over the course of

2008 and 2009.

There is now much more discussion about mental-health issues in the

workplace in countries like Britain and the United States. And for good

reason if the statistics are anything to go by. In Britain, the Health and

Safety Executive reported in 2018 that close to 15 million work days were

lost as a result of workplace-related stress, depression, and anxiety, and that

among a total workforce of 26.5 million, nearly 600,000 individuals self-

reported suffering from work-related mental health issues that year.7 But it

is hard to tell from this data whether the reason more mental-health issues

in the workplace are diagnosed is because in many countries there is now a

trend to pathologize what were once considered to be perfectly normal

stresses and anxieties. And one particularly important manifestation of the

tendency to pathologize is the now widespread acceptance that

“workaholism” is a real, diagnosable condition with potentially fatal

consequences.

Born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1917, Pastor Wayne Oates made the

best of an impoverished childhood in the care of his grandmother and older

sister, while his mother worked long shifts at a local cotton mill to make

ends meet during the Great Depression. But his deeply held Christian faith

taught him to count his blessings, and later gave him the resolve to dedicate

his energy to reconciling the very secular world of psychiatry and

psychology with his religious convictions. A prolific author who penned

fifty-three books in addition to forging a distinguished career as a lecturer at

the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, he saw

something of his own “compulsion . . . to work incessantly” in the behavior

of some of the alcoholics he counseled, and coined the words “workaholic”

and “workaholism” to describe it. First published in 1971, The Confessions

of a Workaholic is now out of print and its avuncular advice is largely

forgotten, but his neologism “workaholic” was instantly ushered into our

everyday vocabulary.

Soon after he introduced the term, workaholism became a hotly contested

niche field in psychology, albeit one marked by an absence of agreement

about how to either define or measure it, let alone treat it. Some insist that it

is an “addiction” like gambling or shopping; some a pathology like bulimia;

others a behavior pattern; and others still a syndrome, born of the unhappy

union of “high-drive” and “low work satisfaction.”

In the absence of a widely agreed definition for workaholism, there are

very few useful statistics indicating its prevalence. The only place where

any systematic statistical work has been conducted is Norway, where

researchers at the University of Bergen developed an assessment

methodology they called the Bergen Work Addiction Scale.8 Reminiscent

of the pop-psychology quizzes in the lifestyle magazines of waiting rooms,

the Bergen assessment involves allocating numerical scores based on

standardized responses to seven simple statements, like “You become

stressed if you are prohibited from working” or “You prioritize working

over hobbies and leisure activities.” If you respond “always” or “often” to a

majority of these questions, then, the test’s authors reason, you are probably

a workaholic. The Bergen research group used data from 1,124 survey

responses and cross-referenced these with a series of other personality tests.

At the end of it all, they concluded that 8.3 percent of Norwegians were

“workaholics,” and that workaholism was most prevalent among adults

between eighteen and forty-five years old, and was far more likely to afflict

people who were generally “agreeable,” “intellectually motivated,” and/or

“neurotic.” They also noted that the prevalence rate was sufficiently high

for it to merit concern as a public health problem.

In much the same way that John Lubbock considered careful scientific

research and writing lengthy monographs to be leisure, for many of us the

only distinction between work and leisure is whether we are paid to do an

activity or whether we are doing it by choice—and, often enough, actually

paying cash earned in regular jobs to do it.

Taking into account time spent getting to and from the workplace and

doing essential household activities like shopping, housework, and

childcare, working a standard forty-hour week does not leave a great deal of

time for leisure. Unsurprisingly, most people in full-time employment use

the bulk of their pure leisure time for restful, passive activities like

watching TV. But unlike in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, most

employees have weekends to themselves as well as several weeks of paid

annual vacation. And many people choose not to spend these precious hours

resting but instead use them for doing work of their choice.

Beyond those who disappear into computer games (which often involve

activities that mimic actual work), many of the most popular hobbies people

choose to spend their free time on involve doing forms of work that in the

past we might have been paid to do or that other people are still paid to do.

Thus while fishing and hunting were work for the foragers, they are now

expensive but very popular leisure activities; where growing vegetables or

gardening was viewed as odious labor by farmers, for many it is now a

deeply satisfying form of pleasure; and where sewing, knitting, pottery, and

painting were once a source of much needed income, people now find peace

in their relaxing, often repetitive rhythms. Indeed, many hobbies and leisure

pursuits—among them cooking, ceramics, painting, ironmongery,

woodwork, and home-engineering—involve the development, refinement,

and use of the kinds of manual and intellectual skills that we depended upon

through our evolutionary history, and that are increasingly absent in the

modern workplace.

Another reason that psychologists have struggled to define and measure

workaholism is because for as long as people have gathered together in

cities, many have viewed their work as far more than simply a means of

making a living. When Emile Durkheim contemplated possible solutions to

the problem of anomie, he recognized that relationships forged in the

workplace might help build the “collective consciousness” that once bound

people into small, well-integrated village communities. Indeed, one of the

solutions he proposed for dealing with problems of social alienation in

cities was the formation of workers’ guilds similar to the hundreds of

collegia that were formed in ancient Rome.

It was not a flippant suggestion. The Romans’ artisan collegia were not

just trade organizations lobbying on behalf of their members’ interests.

They played a vital role in establishing the civic identities for the humiliores

—the lower classes—based on work, and then binding them into the larger

hierarchies that bound Roman society. In many respects, the collegia

operated like autonomous villages within the city. Each had its own

customs, rituals, modes of dress, and festivals, and its own patrons,

magistrates, and general assemblies modeled on the Roman Senate, which

had the power to issue decrees. Some even had their own private militias.

But above all, they were social organizations that bound people together

into close-knit micro-communities based on work, values, norms, and

shared social status, and in which intermarriage was frequent, and members

and their families socialized mainly with one another.

Many people are now accustomed to life in big cities with mass-transit

systems that allow us to move from one side of town to the other far quicker

than Romans ever could. Many are now also accustomed to having a device

at their fingertips that allows them to form dynamic, active communities

regardless of geography. Even so, most modern city dwellers still tend to

embed themselves into surprisingly small and often diffuse social networks,

which become their individual communities.

When the paleoanthropologist Robin Dunbar made the case that gossip

and grooming played a central role in the development of our evolutionary

ancestors’ linguistic abilities, he based his argument partially on an

examination of the relationship between brain size and composition of

different primate species and the size and complexity of the active social

network groups each species typically maintained. He noticed a clear

correlation. Extrapolating from the data on various other primate species,

Dunbar calculated that based on human brain size most of us would be able

to maintain active networks of in the region of 150 individuals, and would

struggle to cope with more because the business of keeping track of their

interactions and interrelationships was far too complex. When he correlated

this with data on village sizes gathered by anthropologists across the world,

social network sizes of foragers like the Ju/’hoansi and the Hadzabe, and

even numbers of “friends” people actively engaged with on social media

sites like Facebook, it turned out he was broadly right: most of us still only

maintain active relationships with around 150 or so people at any one time.9

For much of human history, these immediate social networks took the

form of multi-generational communities that were rooted in shared

geography, expressed through the intimacy of kinship, shared religious

beliefs, rituals, practices, and values, and were nourished by working and

living in the same environments and experiencing similar things. But in

densely packed cities, most individuals’ extended social networks take the

form of complex intersecting mosaics of relationships cobbled together

from our involvement in a whole series of sometimes very different

interests and hobbies. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for many of us our

regular social networks are made up of people we have worked with or

encountered at work.

Beyond the fact that most of us spend considerably more time in the

company of colleagues than our families, and structure our daily routines

around work obligations, the work we do often becomes a social focal

point, which in turn shapes our ambitions, values, and political affiliations.

It is no coincidence that when we first test the waters with strangers at

social gatherings in cities, we tend to ask them about the work they do, and

on the basis of their answers make reasonably reliable inferences about their

political views, lifestyles, and even backgrounds. It is also no coincidence

that the only regular survey of romance in the workplace has found that

nearly one in three Americans enters into at least one long-term sexual

relationship with people they meet through work, and a further 16 percent

meet their spouses there.10

This is hardly surprising. Our individual career paths are often

determined by our backgrounds, schooling, and subsequent choices about

training. As a result, we tend to progressively align our world views and

expectations with those of both our teachers and co-workers, and also tend

to look for work among similar people and, where possible, make use of

existing social networks to do so. Thus human resources managers at

Goldman Sachs do not have to deal with many job applications from people

who view usury as sinful, army recruiters don’t get many applications from

dyed-in-the-wool pacifists, and police recruiters do not have to field job

applications from avowed anarchists. And just as importantly, once in work

we tend to continue to further align our views of the world with those of our

colleagues, as our bonds to them are strengthened in the course of pursuing

shared goals and celebrating shared achievements.

But even if work offers people a sense of community and belonging, the

kinds of communities that Durkheim imagined might coalesce around the

workplace have not materialized to the extent he predicted. Indeed, when

Durkheim pictured the city of the future as being made up of a mosaic of

work-based communities, he hadn’t quite come to grips with the changing

nature of employment and work in the industrial era. It was as if he

imagined that the trade skills rendered redundant by industrialization would

be straightforwardly substituted for another set of new, enduring useful

skills. He did not, for example, imagine workplaces operating according to

the “scientific management” methods developed by Frederick Winslow

Taylor, in which actual skills were superfluous to requirements. Nor for that

matter did he imagine quite the extent to which technological developments

would make the workplace in the modern industrial era one of constant

flux, in which cutting-edge skills acquired in one decade would become

redundant the next.

In 1977, Ben Aronson, a civil servant in the employ of the State of Illinois,

collapsed with internal bleeding. He was subsequently diagnosed with

severe heart problems that required surgery to remedy. He attributed his

illness to work-related stress, and explained to a reporter for the Florida

Times-Union that he was especially worried because his combined vacation

and sick leave entitlement was only four weeks and his doctor insisted he

could not return to work in his frail condition.11

Aronson was not, however, just one among many suffering the

consequences of overwork. The reason why this story briefly merited the

attention of journalists was that his heart problems arose as a result of

underwork.

A few months before Aronson’s collapse, his employers had attempted to

lay him off for a second time in a few short years. On both occasions,

Aronson sued them for unlawful dismissal and on both occasions the courts

found in his favor and ordered his employers to reinstate him. This they

duly did, but the second time it happened it was only through gritted teeth.

They informed Aronson that while he would still receive his very handsome

monthly salary of $1,730 (worth around $7,500 in today’s money), he

would be given no duties of any kind to perform. They then removed the

telephone from his office, instructed the mailroom not to deliver or collect

his mail, and instructed other staff to ignore him.

Sadly Aronson’s story was not newsworthy enough to merit an additional

follow-up, and it is unknown whether he ended up being fired from his non-

job as a result of non-attendance due to the ill health he suffered as a result

of not having meaningful work to do. But there are many people who will

see something of themselves in his strange individual circumstances.

A well-paid job for life with zero responsibilities might be like a dream

come true to some. But for others, once the novelty of it all wore off, they

would miss the structure, the community, and the sense of being useful that

they derived from their jobs, regardless of how mundane or how poorly

paid they were. And if the job involved skill, they would almost certainly

miss the often mute pleasure they gained in performing it too. Included in

this group are the thousands of lottery winners and individuals who

inherited unexpected wealth from distant relatives and continued to perform

their old, often not particularly interesting jobs with the same cheerful

diligence as before.

Then there are those who work in the service sector of our economies

who relate to Aronson’s story because if their office e-mail and intranet

accounts were suddenly blocked, their computers and telephones removed,

and their colleagues instructed to ignore them, they know deep down that

their absence would make little difference to the fortunes of their

organization.

According to the UK Office of National Statistics, 83 percent of working

people in Great Britain are now employed in the ever more amorphous

“service” or “tertiary” sector. Sometimes referred to as the tertiary

economy, the service sector includes any job that does not involve

producing or harvesting raw materials as in farming, mining, and fishing, or

the manufacture of actual things, like knives and forks and nuclear missiles,

from those raw materials.

Britain is not unusual among the world’s richer countries in having such

a large proportion of its workforce employed in the service sector. It trails

behind states like Luxembourg and Singapore, where pretty much everyone

with a job is employed in the service sector in one way or another. But it is

way ahead of most developing countries like Tanzania, where the majority

of people still farm for a living. It is also some way ahead of countries like

China, where despite a recent and ongoing surge in service-sector jobs,

more than half the population are still employed in farming, fishing,

mining, and manufacturing.

The supremacy of the service sector in many economies is a relatively

recent phenomenon. Up until the surge in agricultural production across

Europe during the sixteenth century, an estimated three-quarters of Britons

still made a living as farmers, quarrymen, foresters, and fishermen. By

1851, once the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, that number declined

to just over 30 percent, with around 45 percent of the working population

employed in manufacturing and the remaining 25 percent in services.12 This

ratio remained largely unchanged until after the First World War. Then it

climbed slowly upward again, as homes and industries began to draw

energy directly from electricity networks, and new technologies like the

internal combustion engine came online, so catalyzing the invention and

manufacture of a whole range of new things for aspirant households and

individuals to consume. This trend continued beyond the end of the Second

World War until 1966, when Britain’s manufacturing sector went into a

steady and steep decline. Where in 1966 an estimated 40 percent of the

workforce was employed in manufacturing, by 1986 this number had

dropped to 26 percent, and by 2006 to 17 percent. Technology and

automation played an important role in transforming what were once labor-

intensive manufacturing industries into capital-intensive ones. So too did

globalization, as the most labor-intensive industries progressively began

losing out to manufacturers operating in geographies where labor was

cheaper than in Britain.

The rapid expansion of the service sector is thought by many economists

to follow on inevitably from large-scale industrialization. It is also now

often considered to be the hallmark feature of “post-industrial societies.”

This, at least, was the view of Colin Clark, the economist most closely

associated with developing the now well-established “three sector model”

of the economy. Writing in 1940, Clark accurately predicted the subsequent

expansion of the service sector in economies like Britain’s over the

following eight decades. He observed that as the total wealth in an economy

increased as a result of capital growth, technological development, and

improving productivity, so demand for services rose, thus offsetting job

losses in fishing, farming, and mining (the primary sector).13

Clark was a socially minded economist. He believed that in addition to

working to create a stable and productive economy, it was an economist’s

moral duty to help attain “the just distribution of wealth between

individuals and groups.”14 Even so, his model of post-industrialization has

been heavily criticized since then, in particular by commentators from the

economic left, as a model for “capitalist development” masquerading as a

model of human development.

Clark’s tri-sector model indicating how service-sector employment offset declines in primary and

secondary industries

Clark’s famous graphical model depicting the evolving relationship

between the three sectors over time is an accurate representation of what

has happened in the economies of Western Europe, Japan, and the United

States. Other economies, among them China’s, also seem to be tacking

along the path Clark predicted, with services going steadily upward in

proportion to the decline in agriculture, and with manufacturing

progressively declining in importance. But it is hard to account for the

massive increase in service-sector professions as a response to actual deep

need, or even the efforts of advertisers and influencers to persuade us of

their importance.

The other problem with Clark’s model is that while the employment of

the majority of a national population in the service sector is very clearly a

new phenomenon, the sector is as old as the oldest cities, even if the

services didn’t extend very far beyond the city walls. In even the grandest

ancient cities, like Rome, manufacturing was a relatively low-level industry

and conspicuous consumption the sole preserve of the wealthiest patricians

and merchants. The same was almost certainly true of ancient cities like

Uruk, where the majority of the population was made up of priests,

administrators, accountants, soldiers, and, apparently, bartenders. It is

difficult to account for the preponderance of service-sector jobs in ancient

cities like Uruk, Memphis, Luoyang, or Rome in terms of increasing

demand for services on the back of a surge in manufacturing productivity.

Taking a much longer-term perspective on our relationship with work

suggests that there are perhaps other ways to interpret the rapid expansion

of the service sector, as economies become increasingly “post-

industrialized.”

One is to recognize that many (but by no means all) services are

responsive to fundamental human needs, which are also part of our

evolutionary inheritance and are not easily met in cities when people are

removed from small close-knit social communities. Doctors exist because

we like to live and because we dislike pain; artists and entertainers exist to

bring us pleasure; hairstylists exist because some of us like to look good or

need a sympathetic ear to listen; DJs exist because we like to dance; and

bureaucrats exist because even the most passionate anarchists want the

buses to run on schedule. Demand for these kinds of services did not

increase as a result of improvements in manufacturing. They always

existed. Instead, once agriculture and manufacturing were sufficiently

productive to enable many people not to focus the bulk of their time and

energy producing or making things, these other fundamental needs were

amplified.

Another way to interpret the expansion of the service sector is in terms of

the culture of work that has become so deeply ingrained in us since the

agricultural revolution. This is a culture that makes us intolerant of

freeloaders and canonize gainful employment as the basis of our social

contract with one another even if many jobs don’t serve much purpose other

than keeping people busy. This in turn speaks to the fundamental

relationship between life, energy, order, and entropy. In much the same way

that masked weavers and bowerbirds use their surplus energy to build

elaborate and often unnecessary structures, so humans, when gifted

sustained energy surpluses, have always directed that energy into something

purposeful. From this perspective, the emergence of many ancient service-

sector professions was simply a result of the fact that wherever and

whenever there has been a large, sustained energy surplus, people (and

other organisms) have found creative ways to put it to work. In the human

case, this involved the development of a myriad of remarkable and very

different skills, the learning and execution of which often brings us great

satisfaction. This is why cities have always been crucibles of artistry,

intrigue, curiosity, and discovery.

Incorporating neurosurgeons, university lecturers, bankers, burger-flippers,

and quantum-vibration-tantric astrologers, the service sector is now so big

and diverse that it has ceased to be particularly useful to analysts trying to

understand the ebb and flow of our job markets. Understandably, scholars

now consider Clark’s division of economic sectors to be obsolete. Some

have proposed the addition of another “quaternary” sector specifically to

accommodate computing, coding, research, and other cutting-edge high-

tech industries like genomics. But this too is problematic, given the extent

to which digital technologies have been transforming other economic

sectors. As a result, most analysts prefer to divide the sector up into more

granular functions, such as hospitality and tourism, financial services,

healthcare, and so on.

Others have proposed a more radical reimagining of the service sector

and with it the economy as a whole. Some of these ideas hark back to the

postwar era in Western economies when governments were more inclined to

design good social policies and then work out how to pay for them, rather

than make good economic policies and wonder what social goods they

might be able to bolt onto them. Central to most is that the way markets

allocate value is rarely a fair reflection of the way most people do.

The people who we depend on to educate our children or nurse us when

we are ill, for example, are now paid considerably less than those who make

a living advising the wealthy how to avoid taxation or who design new

ways to spam us with endless unwanted advertising. As a result some

analysts argue in favor of disaggregating the service sector to better account

for the kinds of non-monetary value—like health or happiness—that

different jobs create. No one doubts the non-monetary value that doctors,

nurses, teachers, waste collectors, plumbers, cleaners, bus drivers, and

firemen provide. And while views on what counts as entertainment vary,

few people dispute the fact that entertainers, chefs, musicians, tour guides,

hoteliers, masseuses, and others whose work involves bringing others

happiness or stimulating and inspiring them are important too.

One of the most novel approaches to re-categorizing roles in the service

sector is that proposed by the anthropologist David Graeber. In a brief essay

he wrote in 2013,15 which subsequently went viral and later formed the

basis of a book, he differentiated between jobs that were genuinely useful,

like teaching, medicine, farming, and scientific research, and the apparent

efflorescence of other jobs that served no obvious purpose other than giving

someone something to do. This latter category of jobs, which he argues

includes corporate lawyers, public relations executives, health and

academic administrators, and financial service providers, he referred to as

“bullshit jobs” and defined as forms “of employment that is so completely

pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify

its existence.”16

“It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the

sake of keeping us all working,” he argued.17

For each person in a role which they may think of as a bullshit job, there

are of course others in near identical roles who nevertheless find

satisfaction, purpose, and fulfillment in them. Even so, the fact that

workplace surveys consistently find more people are dissatisfied with the

work they do, suggests that this is often just a coping mechanism—a

characteristic of a species whose evolutionary history has been shaped so

profoundly by its need for purpose and meaning.

Graeber was by no means the first to notice the proliferation of pointless

jobs in the burgeoning service sectors that characterize post-industrial

societies. The tendency for organizational bureaucracies to balloon is now

sometimes referred to as Parkinson’s Law, after Cyril Northcote Parkinson,

who proposed it in a tongue-in-cheek article he published in The Economist

in 1955. Based on his experiences in the notoriously flabby Colonial

Service, Parkinson’s Law states that “work inevitably expands to fill the

time available for its completion,”18 and correspondingly that bureaucracies

will always generate enough internal work to appear busy and important

enough to ensure their continued existence or growth without any

corresponding expansion in output. While it was very clearly not

Parkinson’s intention when writing this article, the language he uses is

remarkably reminiscent of that used by scientists like Schrödinger when

describing the relationship between work, energy, and life. According to

Parkinson’s Law, for bureaucracies to stay alive and grow, they must

continuously harvest energy, in the form of cash, and do work even if, like

energetic masked weavers, the work serves no more purpose than

expending energy.

Parkinson’s Law may now only occasionally be invoked by CEOs when

downsizing and by debt-laden governments somberly demanding greater

austerity, but it is nonetheless something that many in managerial roles are

intuitively aware of, even if they haven’t a name to give it. After all, in

many organizations one of the principal skills required to be recognized as

“top talent” is to be able to bid eloquently for big chunks of budget and

more staff to execute grand, but ultimately pointless, projects, just as the

quickest route to an undignified exit is to underspend one’s budget.

There is evidence of bureaucratic bloat everywhere, but the scale of it

only becomes clear when looking at how it has afflicted organizations and

institutions like universities, whose basic purpose has not changed

substantially for centuries.

In the United States, where the oldest university, Harvard, was

established in 1736, student tuition fees, adjusted for inflation, are now on

average between two and three times what they were in 1990.19 In the

United Kingdom, where the oldest universities date from the twelfth

century, tertiary education was not only free for British residents until 1998,

but most students were provided with means-tested maintenance grants by

their local authorities that were generous enough for them to be able to live

in relative comfort without having to seek paid work during term times to

make ends meet. Since their introduction in 1998, tuition fees have risen

900 percent. In both the the United States and United Kingdom, all but the

wealthiest prospective students recognize that on graduation they will likely

be saddled with debts that will take decades to settle. While the huge

increases in fees in the UK have been accelerated by some external

economic factors, the principal justification for their escalation is the need

to finance ever more bloated administrative functions. At California State

University, for instance, the total number of managerial and professional

administrators employed rose from 3,800 in 1975 to 12,183 in 2008, while

the total number of teaching positions only rose from 11,614 to 12,019.

This is equivalent to an increase in the number of teaching staff of 3.5

percent versus 221 percent in administrative staff. Notably, almost all of the

administrative staff expansion was in office-based bureaucratic roles. In

fact, over the same period the number of clerical, service, and maintenance

jobs declined by almost a third.20

Some of the new administrative roles in universities, and many other

organizations, are important and useful. All functioning bureaucracies are

also incubators of policy wonks, technical specialists, and experts, people

who find deep satisfaction in the arcana of their roles and without whom

everything would grind to a halt. But it is also hard to avoid the suspicion

that many of them are important only because their incumbents are good at

persuading themselves and others that they are important, or because they

exist only to observe, measure, and evaluate somebody else doing

something important.

This is certainly the view of many academics. Rather than freeing them

up to spend more time doing research and teaching, they now almost

universally report spending a considerably higher proportion of their

workweek doing administration than was the case two decades ago. They

also note that while many administrative roles are less specialized than

academic ones, and considerably less competitive, they often merit much

higher salaries. In the UK, for example, four in ten academics in 2016 were

reported to be contemplating quitting the jobs they consider to be vocational

and that they had worked for years to secure.21

There is no doubt that many people—among them some of those employed

in “nonsense” roles—find satisfaction in their work, or at the very least

enjoy the companionship and structure it brings to their lives. Even so, the

problem is that the overwhelming majority of workers across the world

don’t get a great deal of satisfaction out of their jobs. In the most recent

iteration of Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report, it is

revealed that only very few people find their work meaningful or

interesting. They note soberly that “the global aggregate from Gallup data

collected in 2014, 2015 and 2016 across 155 countries indicates that just

15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their job. Two-thirds are not

engaged, and 18% are actively disengaged.” They do, however, note some

significant differences in engagement across different geographies. The

U.S. and Canada, where 31 percent and 27 percent respectively of the

workforces are engaged by their jobs, are the world leaders in “workplace

engagement.” By contrast, only 10 percent of Western European workers

are engaged, but at least they are happier than workers in Japan, China,

South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan where only between five and seven

out of every hundred workers are stimulated by their work.22

The rise of the service sector may be a testament to our collective

creativity when it comes to inventing new jobs to accommodate those

ejected from the production lines in the ever more automated and efficient

manufacturing sector. But we clearly aren’t that clever when it comes to

creating (or rewarding) jobs people are likely to find meaningful or

fulfilling. Even more importantly, it is now far from certain whether or not

the service sector will be able to accommodate all of those whose work will

be determined superfluous to requirements by the next tide of automation,

whose waves are already licking against the shores of this last refuge of

working men and women in the post-industrial age.

THE NEW DISEASE

“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not

yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the

years to come—namely, technological unemployment,” warned John

Maynard Keynes when describing his post-work utopia. “This means

unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of

labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor,” he

added. It was a sensible clarification for his 1930s audience. People had

worried about the possibility of their trades or livelihoods being elbowed

out by new technologies and ways of working ever since the Industrial

Revolution shifted into second gear. But few saw quite as vividly as Keynes

the extent to which the drive to even greater efficiency and automation

would cannibalize demand for human labor.

In hindsight, Keynes underestimated the extent to which ballooning

service sectors in “advanced economies” almost effortlessly soaked up

people ejected from farms, mines, fisheries, and increasingly automated

production lines. The rapid expansion of services is also why despite the

widespread automation of many once commonplace roles in many

countries, from ticket sellers at train stations to checkout attendants in

supermarkets, until recently discussion about the potential of automation to

cannibalize the workplace remained largely confined to a few technology

hubs, corporate boardrooms, and academic journals.

That all changed in September 2013, when Carl Frey and Michael

Osborne from Oxford University published the results of a research project

to assess the accuracy of John Maynard Keynes’s predictions about

technological unemployment.1

The reason that the Oxford study caused such a stir was because Frey and

Osborne concluded that not only were robots already queuing at the factory

gates but that they had fixed their beady little robot-eyes on nearly half of

all existing jobs in the United States. Based on a survey of 702 different

professions, they reckoned that 47 percent of all current jobs in the United

States had “high risk” of being automated out of existence by as early as

2030. The other thing they noted was that the people who were most at risk

tended not to be those who were bloating up bureaucracies or middle

management, but those with the more hands-on roles usually associated

with lower levels of formal education.

A flood of similar studies followed. Governments, multilateral

organizations, think tanks, gilded corporate clubs like the World Economic

Forum, and, inevitably, the big management consultancy firms all got in on

the act. While each deployed slightly different methodologies, their findings

all added layers of detail to Frey and Osborne’s gloomy assessment.

A study conducted by the club of most of the world’s biggest economies,

the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for

instance, concluded that the impacts of automation were likely to be

geographically varied both within and across member states. Some regions,

like West Slovakia, they anticipated might experience job attrition rates of

40 percent, while others, like Norway’s capital, Oslo, would barely notice

anything with fewer than 5 percent of roles being automated. “Top talent” at

McKinsey and Company’s Global Institute suggested that between 30 and

70 percent of jobs were vulnerable to partial automation over the course of

the next fifteen to thirty-five years, and another big consultancy firm,

PricewaterhouseCoopers, suggested that 30 percent of jobs in the United

Kingdom, 38 percent of jobs in the United States, 35 percent in Germany,

and only 21 percent in Japan were vulnerable.2

All these studies agreed that some subsectors were considerably more

vulnerable to automation than others, because the technology was already

affordable enough for businesses to realize a relatively quick return on any

investments they made in technology. They noted that the most vulnerable

subsectors, those with more than half of existing roles on the chopping

board, were “water, sewerage and waste management” and “transportation

and storage.” These were closely followed by “wholesale and retail” as well

as manufacturing subsectors, which are likely to reduce their labor forces

by between 40 and 50 percent in the near future.3

They also noted that some professions appeared to be largely immune

from automation, at least in the short term. Among these were those that

depended on the slippery arts of persuasion, like public relations; those that

demanded a high degree of empathy, like psychiatry; those that required

creativity, like fashion design; and those that demanded a high degree of

manual or finger dexterity, like surgeons.

But any reassurances they offered were only tentative. Considerable

investment is being poured into creating machines with human-like or

better levels of dexterity, as well as others that are capable of mimicking

social intelligence and creativity. As a result, what appeared to be

impossibly distant milestones in automation just a couple of years ago are

now looming large. In 2017, for instance, Xiaoyi, a robot developed by

Tsinghua University in Beijing, in collaboration with a state-owned

company, sailed through China’s National Medical Licensing Examination,

and Google’s AlphaGO thrashed the world’s best human Go players. This

was considered a particularly important milestone because, unlike chess, Go

cannot be won using information-processing power alone. In 2019, an

austere black column, the IBM Debater, which had been practicing

sharpening its tongue arguing in private with IBM employees for several

years, put in a losing but persuasive and “surprisingly charming”

performance arguing in favor of preschool subsidies against a one-time

grand finalist from the World Debating Championships.4 More than this,

with technology to generate deep-fake videos now accessible to everybody

with an Internet connection and machines getting ever better at interpreting

human language and making creative use of it, there is a palpable sense that

no one’s job is entirely safe. It was thus no surprise when in 2018 Unilever

announced it was farming out part of its recruitment functions to an

automated AI system, saving the company 70,000 person-hours of work per

year.5

Another reason organizations like the OECD are uncertain about the

potential of AI and machine learning is because those working to design

these systems are uncertain as well. They note that some machine learning

and AI protocols look like dead ends and that investing additional time into

them may be throwing good money after bad. Even so, new models, many

drawing on neuropsychology, are being developed all the time, and the

trend is moving in only one direction.

Many assessments of the potential capabilities of robotics and AI to

cannibalize the job market are curiously reticent to engage with some of the

easier to predict but profound economic implications. Indeed, most

cheerfully assert that automation will usher in a wonderful new world of

even greater productivity, efficiency, and ever grander dividends for

shareholders.

This is perhaps understandable for the likes of McKinsey and Co. After

all, addressing some of the other implications demands venturing down a

wormhole in which they will be forced to contemplate a top-to-toe rebuild

of the economic system that keeps them in wagyu steaks and flying in the

front of the plane. One of these is the final demise of any lingering pretense

that there is proportional correspondence between human labor, effort, and

reward. Another is the closely related question: who will benefit from

automation and how?

Even if many people still routinely underestimate the extent of material

inequality in their home countries, a growing body of research suggests that

in some places politicians only do so at their peril. And while this research

addresses the sometimes very high differentials in income characteristic of

both advanced economies like the United States’ and rapidly growing ones

like China’s, they now focus increasingly on differentials in net wealth.

After all, since the Great Decoupling, asset ownership has proved a far

more lucrative way of generating additional wealth than hard work.

At first, from the late 1980s through to the early 2000s, the widespread

adoption of increasingly affordable digital technologies helped drive

substantial reductions in inequality between countries. It did this in

particular by helping poorer countries to compete for and then capture a

growing proportion of the global manufacturing industry. Now increased

automation looks likely to halt or even reverse the trend. By taking labor

ever more out of the equation, automation removes any advantage countries

with lower wage demands might have, because the costs of technology,

unlike labor, are pretty much the same everywhere.

However, automation is not only likely to entrench further structural

inequality between countries. Without a fundamental shift in the way

economies are organized, it will dramatically exacerbate inequality within

many countries as well. It will do this firstly by diminishing opportunities

for unskilled and semi-skilled people to find decent employment, while

simultaneously inflating the incomes of those few who continue to manage

what are largely automated businesses.6 As importantly, it will increase

returns on capital rather than labor, so expanding the wealth of those who

have cash invested in businesses, rather than those who depend on taking

cash from them in exchange for labor. This means straightforwardly that

automation will generate further wealth for the already wealthy, while

further disadvantaging those who do not have the means to purchase stakes

in companies and so free-ride off the work done by automata. Of course,

this would not be as much of a challenge were it not the case that since the

Great Decoupling, the wealthiest 1 percent of people globally has captured

twice as much of the new wealth generated by economic growth as the rest

of us. The richest 10 percent of people on earth now own an estimated 85

percent of all global assets,7 and the richest 1 percent own 45 percent of all

global assets.

Many automata and AI already do indispensable work. Among them are

the clever algorithms on which the genome researchers and epidemiologists

now depend, a whole host of new digital diagnostic tools available to

medical practitioners, and increasingly sophisticated climate and

meteorological models. Just as importantly, without them we lack the

capability to manage our ever more complex cities and the digital and

physical infrastructure that sustains them. However, most autonomously

intelligent machine systems will be put to work with a single purpose in

mind: generating wealth for their owners with none of the obligations that

come from having other humans do that work (even if they could). Indeed,

in parallel with the Great Decoupling, there has been a progressive transfer

of wealth from public to private hands. Where private wealth relative to

national income has doubled in most wealthy countries over the last thirty

years, national income relative to private wealth in most rich countries has

plummeted. In China, for instance, the value of public wealth has declined

from 70 percent of the value of all national wealth to 30 percent over this

period, and in the United States and the United Kingdom, net public wealth

has moved into negative territory since the financial crisis.8

Fully automated production lines do not work for free. Their basic energy

needs are often even greater than those of people. They also require

periodic upgrades and running repairs. But unlike employees, they don’t

strike, and when they are no longer fit for purpose they don’t demand

severance packages or expect to be supported by pension plans. More than

this, replacing or recycling them incurs no moral costs, with the result that

no CEO is going to lose sleep before having them uninstalled and

dispatched for recycling or scrap.

When John Maynard Keynes imagined his utopian future, he did not dwell

on automation’s potential to exacerbate inequality. His utopia was one

where, because everybody’s basic needs were easily met, inequality had

become an irrelevance. Only the foolish did more work than they needed to.

Almost like a foraging society, his utopia was a place where anyone who

pursued wealth for wealth’s sake invited ridicule rather than praise.

“The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of

money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be

recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those

semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a

shudder to the specialists in mental disease,” he explained. “I see us free,

therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of

religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of

usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable.”

He believed that the transition to near full automation signaled not just

the end of scarcity but of all the social, political, and cultural institutions,

norms, values, attitudes, and ambitions that had congealed around what

once seemed the eternal challenge of solving the economic problem. He

was, in other words, calling time on the economics of scarcity, demanding

its replacement with a new economics of abundance, and calling for the

future demotion of economists from their hallowed position in society to

something more akin to “dentists” who might be called on occasionally to

perform minor surgery when needed.

Nearly thirty years later, John Kenneth Galbraith made a similar

argument when he insisted that the economics of scarcity was sustained by

desires manufactured by wily advertisers. Galbraith was also of the view

that the transition to an economics of abundance would be organic and

shaped by individuals relinquishing the pursuit of wealth in favor of

worthier work. He also believed that this transition was already happening

in post-war America and that at its vanguard was what he called the “New

Class”—those who chose their employment not for the money but rather the

other rewards it yielded, among them pleasure, satisfaction, and prestige.

Maybe Galbraith and Keynes were right and this transformation is

already taking place. On the one hand, millennials in industrialized

countries now routinely insist on finding work they love rather than

learning to love the work they find. There is also a clear trend toward

offering employees greater flexibility in terms of how they execute their

jobs. In many countries, men as well as women are now often offered

parental leave and, courtesy of digital communications, an ever increasing

number of people do their jobs from home a few days every week or work

flexible hours.

But working hours remain stuck around the forty-per-week mark and

many essential workers who do not have the option of working flexibly

endure long and expensive commutes to work, having been priced out of

inner cities. More than this, only 15 percent of people globally say they are

engaged in their jobs, and many of those who Galbraith considered to be

part of his New Class, like academics and schoolteachers, are being tempted

into the private sector. At the same time, like the weeds that followed crops

such as wheat into new continents and new ecosystems, the malady of

infinite aspiration has found a new home. It has colonized and proliferated

across a whole host of digital ecosystems, from Instagram to Facebook, to

which it is supremely well adapted.

Were Keynes still alive today, he may well conclude that he just got the

timing wrong and that the “growing pains” of his utopia were indicative of

a far more persistent, but ultimately curable, condition. Alternatively, he

may conclude that his optimism was unfounded and that our desire to keep

solving the economic problem was so strong that even if our basic needs

were met, we would continue to create often pointless emplacements that

would nevertheless structure our lives and provide purposeful

moneymakers with the opportunity to outdo their neighbors.

Keynes was an active member of London’s Malthusian Society, a group

of enthusiastic birth-control advocates convinced that overpopulation was

the greatest potential threat to any future prosperity. Therefore, it is possible

he would zero in on another, far more pressing problem altogether, which

suggested that it was the medicine Keynes prescribed for curing the

economic problem—technologically led economic growth—that was

making the patient sick.

In 1968, a group of industrialists, diplomats, and academics came together

to form what they later called the “Club of Rome.” Troubled by the fact that

the benefits of economic growth tended to be unevenly distributed, and

alarmed by some of the obvious environmental costs associated with rapid

industrialization, they wanted to better understand the long-term

implications of unbridled economic growth. To this end, they commissioned

Dennis Meadows, a management specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology, to provide them with some answers. Armed with a generous

budget courtesy of the Volkswagen Foundation, Meadows first offered a job

to Donella Meadows, a brilliant biophysicist from Harvard, who also

happened to be his spouse. The two of them then set about recruiting a

diverse team of experts in systems dynamics, agriculture, economics, and

demography. Once his squad had been assembled, he informed the Club of

Rome that, all being well, he would report back to them with his team’s

findings in a couple of years.

Making use of the number-crunching power of the fancy new mainframe

computers recently installed at MIT, Meadows and his team developed a

series of algorithms to model the dynamic relationship between

industrialization, population growth, food production, the use of non-

renewable resources, and environmental degradation. They then used these

to run a series of scenario-based simulations to model how our short-term

actions might impact us in future.

The results of this ambitious exercise were first presented to the Club of

Rome in private and then published, in 1972, in a book, The Limits to

Growth. The conclusions Meadows and his team reached were very

different from Keynes’s utopian dream. They were also not what the Club

of Rome, nor anyone else for that matter, wanted to hear.

Aggregating the outcomes of the various scenarios they fed into their

mainframes showed unequivocally that if there were no significant changes

to historical economic and population growth trends—if business continued

as usual—then the world would witness a “sudden and uncontrollable

decline in both population and industrial capacity” within a century. In

other words, their data showed that our continued preoccupation with

solving the economic problem was the starkest problem facing humankind

and that the likeliest outcome if things continued was catastrophe.

But their message wasn’t all bleak. They believed that not only was there

time to take action but that it was well within our capabilities to do so. It

just required accepting that we needed to abandon our preoccupation with

perpetual economic growth. Despite some minor reservations about the

methodology and the fact that the model made few allowances for us to

innovate miracle cures that might chase the problem away, the Club of

Rome were persuaded by Meadows’s team’s findings.

“We are unanimously convinced that rapid, radical redressment of the

present unbalanced and dangerously deteriorating world situation is the

primary task facing humanity,”9 they warned ominously, and insisted that

the window of opportunity to act was closing alarmingly fast and that this

was not a problem that could be kicked down the road for the next

generation to deal with.

The world was not ready to embrace such a gloomy vision of the future

and no one wanted even to contemplate the weighty responsibilities that, if

true, it imposed on them. Nor was anyone ready to contemplate the idea that

the very virtues that defined human progress—our productivity, ambition,

energy, and hard work—might lead us to perdition. “Garbage in, garbage

out,” snorted the New York Times in a scathing review that declared The

Limits of Growth to be “an empty and misleading work.”10

The New York Times set the tone for a quarter of a century of vicious

criticism. Economists lined up to declare The Limits to Growth “foolishness

or fraud.”11 They insisted that the report underestimated human ingenuity

and so should be dismissed as a ham-fisted assault on the very foundations

of their noble profession. Demographers contemptuously compared it to

Robert Malthus’s dire warnings of global catastrophe. For a while, it

seemed almost everyone wanted to twist another knife into The Limits to

Growth. When the Catholic Church declared it an assault on God and the

endlessly bickering left-wing movements of Europe and America declared

the book propaganda for an elitist conspiracy who intended to deprive the

working classes and the impoverished citizens of Third World countries of a

future of material plenty, Meadows had good reason to feel despondent.

With so few institutional supporters, governments, businesses, and

international organizations simply chose to ignore it because the authors

could not account for things like oil deposits that had yet to be discovered.

In 2002, Meadows and two other members of the original team revisited

their original projections. They also ran a series of new simulations in

which they included data from the intervening period.12 They showed that

despite the antiquated computer hardware they used in 1972, their

algorithms had done a remarkably good job of anticipating the changes that

had occurred over the preceding thirty years. They also showed that

updated simulations based on the new data only reaffirmed their initial

conclusions that our preoccupation with growth might lead us to oblivion.

The only real difference, they explained, was that in the intervening period,

a critical threshold had passed. Dialing down economic growth was no

longer enough. It needed to be dialed back.

Their update was far more pessimistic than the first book. By then, a

rapidly growing body of scientific research pointed to a whole series of

ominous environmental issues that Meadows and his team had not taken

into account in their original projections. In modeling the potential impacts

of pollutants, for example, the team had not thought to consider the plastics

that now glut the seas and that ensure the sterility of landfill sites the world

over. The original study had briefly mentioned a potential link between

carbon dioxide emissions and possible atmospheric warming, but not that

the planet was already undergoing a particularly rapid period of climate

change as a result of the accumulation of greenhouse gases coughed into the

atmosphere by two centuries of rapidly expanding industrial and

agricultural output.

Since 2002, the models developed by The Limits to Growth team have

been reappraised and updated many times, often by third parties. Even so,

this once landmark study has been overtaken by a tidal wave of newer

studies documenting humankind’s unfolding impact on our environment

and the anticipated consequences of it. There is now far more evidence than

there was in 1972 or even 2002, and computers are capable of spitting out

simulations many orders of magnitude larger and more complex. The

evidence is now so overwhelming that debate within the scientific

community on the scale of human impact on our planet has shifted to asking

whether the current geological era merits being redubbed the Anthropocene

—the human era.

In John Maynard Keynes’s economic utopia, there was no anthropogenic

climate change. Nor was there ocean acidification or large-scale

biodiversity loss. But if there were, it would almost certainly be under

better control than it is now. His utopia was, after all, a place where the

scientific method was respected, scientists were admired, and laypeople

paid serious heed to their warnings. But more importantly, it was a place

where meeting the energy-expensive “relative needs” that animate our urge

to consume had diminished to the point that people were no longer inclined

to periodically upgrade and replace everything they owned simply to keep

the wheels of commerce turning.

It may be the case that we are well on our way to achieving Keynes’s

utopia, that we are just shy of crossing a critical threshold that will change

everything, or that we are so caught up in the hurly-burly of it all that it is

difficult to get a clear sense of its trajectory. The problem is, though, that

we no longer have the luxury of waiting to find out.

To be sure, the ominous prospect of a rapidly changing climate has thus

far spurred lots of talk and some action. The breezy rhetoric of

“sustainability” now routinely perfumes the annual reports, policies, and

plans of international organizations, governments, and businesses alike. Yet,

despite increasing public pressure, there remains obstinate resistance to

even contemplating the substantial steps the Club of Rome recommended

were appropriate back in 1972. Indeed, a huge number of people have

found it easier to question the integrity of hard science, rather than ask the

challenging questions about soft economics that sustainability raises.

It is unsurprising, however, that many initiatives aimed at addressing

anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss have had to try to

justify their existence in terms of the very principles of the economics

responsible for them in the first place. Thus well-heeled hunters gun down

lions, elephants, and a host of other wildlife, persuaded that they are

supporting a handful of jobs that wouldn’t otherwise exist while

simultaneously raising revenues used to protect these species; marine

biologists argue for efforts to restore bleached coral reefs by reference to

the economic impacts likely to be associated with their destruction;

environmentalists debate the fate of functioning ecosystems with politicians

by invoking the “services” these ecosystems undertake on our behalf; and

climatologists find themselves trying to make the “business case” for

reducing carbon emissions or mitigating climate change impacts.

Perhaps those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat the

mistakes of the past. But there are no obvious precedents for some of the

potentially existential challenges that confront us now. After all, never

before in human history have there been 7.5 billion people each capturing

and expending roughly 250 times the energy that our individual forager

forebears did. Fortunately, computing, artificial intelligence, and machine

language have given us tools that enable us to model potential futures far

more accurately than any holy men and soothsayers ever could. As

imperfect as these tools may be, they are improving all the time and so are

shifting our conceptual horizons about cause and effect and about the

consequences of our actions now ever further into the future. Where

foragers, with their immediate-return economies, invested their labor effort

to meet their spontaneous needs, and farmers, with their delayed-return

systems, invested theirs to support themselves for the following year, we

are now obliged to consider the potential consequences of our work over a

much longer time span. One that recognizes that most of us can expect to

live longer than at any time in the past and that is cognizant of the legacy

we leave our descendants. This in turn imposes complex new trade-offs to

be made between short-term gains and longer-term consequences that may

transform those gains into losses.

The inadequacy of history as a guide to the future was one of the

principal points that John Maynard Keynes made when he imagined that by

2030 technological advancement, capital growth, and improvements in

productivity would lead us to a land of “economic bliss.” As far as he was

concerned the future won by automation was uncharted territory, and

successfully navigating it would require imagination, openness, and a

historically unprecedented transformation in our attitudes and values.

“When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social

importance,” he concluded, “there will be great changes in the code of

morals,” as a result of which we shall have no choice but to discard “all

kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of

wealth and of economic rewards and penalties.”

Keynes’s sense that the changes brought about by automation would

catalyze a fundamental revolution in the way people lived, thought, and

organized themselves, echoed that of many other early twentieth-century

thinkers who had voyaged into the future. In this sense, he was not so

different from people like Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim, both of whom

believed that, in the end, history would somehow sort itself out, even if they

had very different views about how that would happen. While Keynes could

not have imagined the scale and risks associated with anthropogenic climate

change and biodiversity loss because of our efforts to solve the economic

problem, being a fan of Robert Malthus he would have understood it

immediately.

Where history is a better guide to the future is on the nature of change. It

reminds us that we are a stubborn species: one that is deeply resistant to

making profound changes in our behavior and habits, even when it is clear

that we need to do so. But it also reveals that when change is forced upon us

we are astonishingly versatile. We are able to quickly adapt to new, often

very different ways of doing and thinking about things and in a short time

become as habituated to them as we were to those that preceded them. This

being so, while automation and AI have made it possible for us to embrace

a profoundly different future, it is unlikely that it will be the catalyst that

causes the dramatic changes in “social customs and economic practices”

that Keynes envisaged. Far more likely catalysts take the form of a rapidly

changing climate, like that which spurred the invention of agriculture; anger

ignited by systematic inequalities like those that stirred the Russian

revolution; or perhaps even a viral pandemic that exposes the obsolescence

of our economic institutions and working culture, causing us to ask what

jobs are truly valuable and question why we are content to let our markets

reward those in often pointless or parasitic roles so much more than those

we recognize as essential.

CONCLUSION

When in the 1960s anthropologists began to work with contemporary

forager societies like the Ju/’hoansi, BaMbuti, and Hadzabe, they did so in

the hope that their work might shed some light on how our ancestors lived

in the deep past. Now it seems that this same body of work might offer

some insights about how we might organize ourselves in an automated

future constrained by severe environmental limits.

We now know, for instance, that the Ju/’hoansi and other Kalahari

foragers are the descendants of a single population group who have lived

continuously in southern Africa since the first emergence of modern Homo

sapiens possibly as long as 300,000 years ago. We also have good reason to

believe that they organized themselves economically in similar ways to how

the Ju/’hoansi lived in the 1960s. If the ultimate measure of sustainability is

endurance over time, then hunting and gathering is by far the most

sustainable economic approach developed in all of human history, and the

Khoisan are the most accomplished exponents of this approach. Hunting

and gathering is, of course, not an option for us now, but these societies

offer hints into some aspects of what a society no longer beholden to the

economic problem might look like. They remind us that our contemporary

attitudes to work are not only the progeny of the transition to farming and

our migration into cities, but also that the key to living well depends on

moderating our personal material aspirations by addressing inequality so

that, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, we might “once more value

ends above means and prefer the good to the useful.”

Reflecting the growing uncertainty about our automated future and the

sustainability of our environments, there has been a recent efflorescence of

manifestos and books proposing how we should or could organize things in

the future. Some have sought to map out a path in broadly economic terms.

Among the most influential have been the many that propose various

models of “post-capitalism,” or those that insist we take economic growth

down from its hallowed pedestal and recognize that the market is at best a

poor arbiter of value, and when it comes to things like our living

environment, a destroyer of it. The most interesting of these have been the

ones that seek to diminish the importance we give to accumulation of

private wealth. These include proposals like granting a universal basic

income (apportioning free money to everyone whether they work or not)

and shifting the focus on taxation from income to wealth. Other interesting

approaches propose extending the fundamental rights we give to people and

companies to ecosystems, rivers, and crucial habitats.

Others still have taken a more optimistic approach, based largely on the

idea that automation and AI will organically usher in a level of such great

material luxury that we will find ways of surmounting whatever obstacles

get in the way of our path to an economic utopia. These echo the idyllic

future imagined by Oscar Wilde in which we are free to spend our time in

pursuit of cultivated leisure, perhaps “by making beautiful things, or

reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration

and delight.”

There has also been a resurgence of interest in models of organizing our

future based on dogma or idyllic fantasies of the past. And while these have

little in common with the visions of more technically minded utopians, they

are no less influential in shaping the opinions and attitudes among a

significant proportion of the global population. The recent rise in many

countries of the toxic nationalism that the architects of the United Nations

hoped would be banished after the horrors of the Second World War is a

reflection of this, as is the trend to greater theological conservatism in many

places, and the willingness of many to defer complicated choices back to

the imagined teachings of ancient gods.

Beyond channeling the spirits of the thousands of generations of makers

and doers, who as faithful servants of that trickster god entropy have found

satisfaction through giving their idle hands and restless minds work to do,

the purpose of this book is somewhat less prescriptive. One aim is to reveal

how our relationship to work—in the broadest sense—is more fundamental

than that imagined by the likes of Keynes. The relationship between energy,

life, and work is part of a common bond we have with all other living

organisms, and at the same time our purposefulness, our infinite

skillfulness, and ability to find satisfaction in even the mundane are part of

an evolutionary legacy honed since the very first stirrings of life on earth.

The principal purpose, however, has been to loosen the claw-like grasp

that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, and to diminish

our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth.

For by recognizing that many of the core assumptions that underwrite our

economic institutions are an artifact of the agricultural revolution, amplified

by our migration into cities, frees us to imagine a whole range of new, more

sustainable possible futures for ourselves, and rise to the challenge of

harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness, and creativity to shaping our

destiny.

Acknowledgments

Many of the main ideas that have shaped this book found their genesis

while I was living and working in Kalahari where foragers, traditional

pastoralists, missionaries, freedom fighters, bureaucrats, policemen,

soldiers, and modern commercial farmers merged and clashed. There are

too many individuals there who shaped my approach and thinking to

mention and in singling out my Ju/’hoan name-father “Oupa” Chief !A/ae

Frederik Langman, who navigated strange frontier with such assured

wisdom, I am extending my gratitude to you all.

A book that spans such huge time horizons is by its nature derivative. It

would not have been possible were it not for the countless hours of research

and analysis by a veritable army of scientists, archaeologists,

anthropologists, philosophers, and others whose diligence, intelligence,

creativity, and hard work continues to refresh and add detail to our sense of

the past, present, and future. I hope I have not done your insights a

disservice in representing them here and placing them alongside what may

sometimes seem unlikely bed fellows.

Writing is ultimately a solitary task. But the kind of isolation it demands

places strains on those closest to you. So to my children, Lola and Noah,

my thanks and love for being kind to your preoccupied Papa and reminding

me of the folly of working too hard on a book about working less. And to

Michelle, my love and gratitude for everything, not least for using your

magic to transform some of the clumsier ideas in this book into wonderful

images.

This was far more work than I imagined it would be when various voices,

the loudest of which belonged to my agent Chris Wellbelove, encouraged

me to write it. My fate was subsequently sealed when editors Alexis

Kirschbaum at Bloomsbury in London and William Heyward at Penguin

Press in New York backed it with terrifying enthusiasm and publishers from

all corners of the earth also piled in. I blame them for endless hours of hard

labor and the anxiety I endured writing it, and am deeply grateful for the

confidence they showed in backing someone whose premise was that we all

should take a far more relaxed approach to work.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Metalibri, Lausanne,

2007 (1776), p. 12, https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf.

2 Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde,

Wordsworth Library Collection, London, 2007, p. 1051.

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1 Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, Du calcul de l’effet des machines, Carilian-Goeury, Paris, 1829.
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4 Peter Schuster, “Boltzmann and Evolution: Some Basic Questions of Biology seen with Atomistic
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5 Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, Cambridge University Press, 1944.
6 Ibid., pp. 60–1.
7 T. Kachman, J. A. Owen, and J. L. England, “Self-Organized Resonance during Search of a
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8 J. M. Horowitz and J. L. England, “Spontaneous fine-tuning to environment in many-species
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https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0138.

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1 Francine Patterson and Wendy Gordon, “The Case for the Personhood of Gorillas,” in Paola
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6 Nicholas E. Collias and Elsie C. Collias, “A Quantitative Analysis of Breeding Behavior in the
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13 Proverbs 6:6–11.
14 Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, 1879, Book 1, Part 2, Chapter 8, section 152, https://mises-
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15 Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State: With Six Essays on Government, Society, and
Freedom, Liberty Classics edition, Indianapolis, 1981, p. 109.
16 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, D. Appleton, New York, 1860, p. 85.
17 Ibid., p. 61.
18 Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, “A conceptual model of new hypothesis on the evolution of biodiversity,”
Biologia, 2016, doi:10.1515/biolog-2016-0032.

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1 R. W. Shumaker, K. R. Walkup, and B. B. Beck, Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture
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2 J. Sackett, “Boucher de Perthes and the Discovery of Human Antiquity,” Bulletin of the History of
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3 Charles Darwin, Letter to Charles Lyell, 17 March 1863,
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10 G. A. Miller, “Informavores,” in Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield (eds), The Study of
Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, Wiley-Interscience, New York, 1983, pp. 111–13.

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1 K. Hardy et al., “Dental calculus reveals potential respiratory irritants and ingestion of essential
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3 S. Herculano-Houzel and J. H. Kaas, “Great ape brains conform to the primate scaling rules:
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7 Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, Faber & Faber, London, 2006,
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8 Alejandro Bonmatí et al., “Middle Pleistocene lower back and pelvis from an aged human
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9 Patrick S. Randolph-Quinney, “A new star rising: Biology and mortuary behaviour of Homo
naledi,” South African Journal of Science 111 (9–10), 2015, 01–04,
https://dx.doi.org/10.17159/SAJS.2015/A0122.

CHAPTER 5
1 Carina M. Schlebusch and Mattias Jakobsson, “Tales of Human Migration, Admixture, and
Selection in Africa,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, Vol. 19, 405–28,
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2 A. S. Brooks et al., “Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest Middle Stone
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7 Richard Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society, Cambridge University
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8 Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore (eds), Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, Harvard University Press,
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9 Richard Lee and Irven DeVore (eds), Man the Hunter, Aldine, Chicago, 1968, p. 3.
10 What Hunters Do for a Living or How to Make Out on Scarce Resources, in Richard B. Lee and
Irven DeVore (eds), Man the Hunter, Aldine, Chicago, 1968.
11 Michael Lambek, “Marshalling Sahlins,” History and Anthropology 28, 2017, 254,
https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2017.1280120.
12 Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Routledge, New York, 1972, p. 2.

CHAPTER 6
1 Colin Turnbull, The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo, London, Simon &
Schuster, 1961, pp. 25–6.
2 J. Woodburn, “An Introduction to Hadza Ecology,” in Richard Lee and Irven DeVore (eds), Man
the Hunter, Aldine, Chicago, 1968, p. 55.
3 James Woodburn, “Egalitarian Societies,” Man, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
17, no. 3, 1982, 432.
4 Ibid., 431–51.
5 Nicolas Peterson, “Demand sharing: reciprocity and pressure for generosity among foragers,”
American Anthropologist 95 (4), 1993, 860–74, doi:10.1525/aa.1993.95.4.02a00050.
6 N. G. Blurton-Jones, “Tolerated theft, suggestions about the ecology and evolution of sharing,
hoarding and scrounging,” Information (International Social Science Council) 26 (1), 1987, 31–
54, https://doi.org/10.1177/053901887026001002.
7 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London, Murray, 1859, p. 192.
8 Richard B Lee, The Dobe Ju/’hoansi, 4th edition, Wadsworth, Belmont, CA, p. 57.
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11 Erik Trinkaus, Alexandra Buzhilova, Maria Mednikova, and Maria Dobrovolskaya, The People of
Sunghir: Burials, bodies and behavior in the earlier Upper Paleolithic, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2014, p. 25.

CHAPTER 7
1 Editorial, Antiquity, Vol. LIV, no. 210, March 1980, 1–6,
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
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2 Greger Larson et al., “Current Perspectives and the Future of Domestication Studies,” Proceedings
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3 M. Germonpre, “Fossil dogs and wolves from Palaeolithic sites in Belgium, the Ukraine and
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5 Larson et al., “Current Perspectives.”
6 Amaia Arranz-Otaegui et al., “Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years
ago in northeastern Jordan,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (31), July
2018, 7925–30, doi:10.1073/pnas.1801071115.
7 Li Liu et al., “Fermented beverage and food storage in 13,000-year-old stone mortars at Raqefet
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9 Ibid.
10 Robert Bettinger, Peter Richerson, and Robert Boyd, “Constraints on the Development of
Agriculture,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 50, no. 5, October 2009; R. F. Sage, “Was low
atmospheric CO2 during the Pleistocene a limiting factor for the origin of agriculture?,” Global
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11 Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Robert Bettinger, “Was agriculture impossible during the
Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis,” American
Antiquity, Vol. 66, no. 3, 2001, 387–411.
12 Jack Harlan, “A Wild Wheat Harvest in Turkey,” Archeology, Vol. 20, no. 3, 1967, 197–201.
13 Liu et al., “Fermented beverage and food storage.”
14 A. Arranz-Otaegui, L. González-Carretero, J. Roe, and T. Richter, “‘Founder crops’ v. wild plants:
Assessing the plant-based diet of the last hunter-gatherers in southwest Asia,” Quaternary
Science Reviews 186, 2018, 263–83.
15 Wendy S. Wolbach et al., “Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered
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Geology 126 (2), 2018, 165–84, Bibcode:2018JG . . . .126..165W. doi:10.1086/695703.
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Biomarker Paleohygrometer Applied to the Gemündener Maar Sediments, Western Eifel,
Germany,” Climate of the Past 15, no. 2, April 9, 2019, 713–33, https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-
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domestication,” Vegetation History Archaeobotany 20, 2011, 305–18.
17 Ian Kuijt and Bill Finlayson, “Evidence for food storage and predomestication granaries 11,000
years ago in the Jordan Valley,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (27), July
2009, 10966–70, doi:10.1073/pnas.0812764106; Ian Kuijt, “What Do We Really Know about
Food Storage, Surplus, and Feasting in Preagricultural Communities?,” Current Anthropology 50
(5), 2009, 641–4, doi:10.1086/605082.

18 Klaus Schmidt, “Göbekli Tepe—the Stone Age Sanctuaries: New results of ongoing excavations

with a special focus on sculptures and high reliefs,” Documenta Praehistorica (Ljubliana) 37,

2010, 239–56.

19 Haldorsen et al., “The Climate of the Younger Dryas as a Boundary for Einkorn Domestication,”

Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 20 (4), 2011, 305.

20 J. Gresky, J. Haelm, and L. Clare, “Modified Human Crania from Göbekli Tepe Provide Evidence

for a New Form of Neolithic Skull Cult,” Science Advances 3 (6), 2017,

https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700564.

CHAPTER 8
1 M. A. Zeder, “Domestication and Early Agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, Diffusion,
and Impact,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105 (33), 2008, 11597,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0801317105.
2 M. Gurven and H. Kaplan, “Longevity among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination,”
Population and Development Review 33 (2), 2007, 321–65.
3 Andrea Piccioli, Valentina Gazzaniga, and Paola Catalano, Bones: Orthopaedic Pathologies in
Roman Imperial Age, Springer, Switzerland, 2015.
4 Michael Gurven and Hillard Kaplan, “Longevity among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural
Examination,” Population and Development Review, Vol. 33, no. 2, June 2007, pp. 321–65,
published by Population Council, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25434609; Väinö Kannisto and
Mauri Nieminen, “Finnish Life Tables since 1751,” Demographic Research, Vol. 1, Article 1,
www.demographic-research.org/Volumes/Vol1/1/, doi:10.4054/DemRes.1999.1.
5 C. S. Larsen et al., “Bioarchaeology of Neolithic Çatalhöyük reveals fundamental transitions in
health, mobility, and lifestyle in early farmers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
USA, 2019, 04345, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1904345116.
6 J. C. Berbesque, F. M. Marlowe, P. Shaw, and P. Thompson, “Hunter-Gatherers Have Less Famine
Than Agriculturalists,” Biology Letters 10, 20130853, http://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2013.0853.
7 D. Grace et al., “Mapping of poverty and likely zoonoses hotspots,” ILRI, Kenya, 2012.
8 S. Shennan et al., “Regional population collapse followed initial agriculture booms in mid-
Holocene Europe,” Nature Communications 4, 2013, 2486.
9 See Ian Morris, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2015, and The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development
Decides the Fate of Nations, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2013; Vaclav Smil, Energy
and Civilization: A History, MIT Press, Boston, 2017.
10 Ruben O. Morawick and Delmy J. Díaz González, “Food Sustainability in the Context of Human
Behavior,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, Vol. 91, no. 2, June 28, 2018, 191–6.
11 E. Fernández et al., “Ancient DNA Analysis of 8000 B.C. Near Eastern Farmers Supports an
Early Neolithic Pioneer Maritime Colonization of Mainland Europe Through Cyprus and the
Aegean Islands,” PLoS Genetics 10, no. 6, 2014, e1004401; H. Malmström et al., “Ancient
Mitochondrial DNA from the Northern Fringe of the Neolithic Farming Expansion in Europe
Sheds Light on the Dispersion Process,” Royal Society of London: Philosophical Transactions B:
Biological Sciences 370, no. 1660, 2015; Zuzana Hofmanová et. al., “Early Farmers from across
Europe Directly Descended from Neolithic Aegeans,” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 113, no. 25, June 21, 2016, 6886, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1523951113.
12 Q. Fu, P. Rudan, S. Pääbo, and J. Krause, “Complete Mitochondrial Genomes Reveal Neolithic
Expansion into Europe,” PLoS ONE 7 (3), 2012, e32473; doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0032473.
13 J. M. Cobo, J. Fort, and N. Isern, “The spread of domesticated rice in eastern and southeastern
Asia was mainly demic,” Journal of Archaeological Science 101, 2019, 123–30.

CHAPTER 9
1 Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Benjamin Vaughn, July 26, 1784.
2 “Poor Richard Improved, 1757,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019,
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-07-02-0030. [Original source: The Papers of
Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 7, October 1, 1756 through March 31, 1758, ed. Leonard W. Labaree,
Yale University Press, New Haven, 1963, pp. 74–93.]
3 Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Section 36, 1793,
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Benjamin_Franklin/Section_Thirty_Six.
4 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Metalibri, Lausanne,
2007 (1776), p. 15, https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pdf.
5 Ibid.
6 G. Kellow, “Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith: Two Strangers and the Spirit of Capitalism,”
History of Political Economy 50 (2), 2018, 321–44.
7 This federation, which comprised the Mohawk, the Seneca, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga,
and the Tuscarora, was of interest to Franklin and was one of the models used by the Founding
Fathers when drafting the United States Constitution.
8 Benjamin Franklin, letter to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753,
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0173.
9 David Graeber, Debt: The First 500 Years, Melville House, New York, 2013, p. 28.
10 Caroline Humphrey, “Barter and Economic Disintegration,” Man 20 (1), 1985, p. 48.
11 Benjamin Franklin, A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, in The
Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. J. Sparks, Vol. II, Boston, 1836, p. 267.
12 Austin J. Jaffe and Kenneth M. Lusht, “The History of the Value Theory: The Early Years,”
Essays in honor of William N. Kinnard, Jr., Kluwer Academic, Boston, 2003, p. 11.

CHAPTER 10
1 All quotes from Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017
(1831 edn).
2 L. Janssens et al., “A new look at an old dog: Bonn-Oberkassel reconsidered,” Journal of
Archaeological Science 92, 2018, 126–38.
3 There is some speculation that a 33,000-year-old set of bones found in Siberia’s Altay Mountains
may also be from a domestic dog, but too many doubts remain regarding its pedigree for
archaeologists to be certain.
4 Laurent A. F. Frantz et al., “Genomic and Archaeological Evidence Suggest a Dual Origin of
Domestic Dogs,” Science 352 (6290), 2016, 1228.
5 L. R. Botigué et al., “Ancient European dog genomes reveal continuity since the Early Neolithic,”
Nature Communications 8, 2017, 16082.
6 Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (25), 2018, 6506.
7 Vaclav Smil, Energy and Civilization: A History, MIT Press, Boston, Kindle Edition, 2017, p. 66.
8 René Descartes, Treatise on Man (Great Minds series), Prometheus, Amherst, Mass., 2003.
9 Aristotle, Politics, Book I, part viii, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?
doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0058%3Abook%3D1.
10 Ibid.
11 Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 303, 40–6. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?
doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0132.
12 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1982.
13 Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society in Ancient Rome, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 63.
14 Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End for the Roman Republic,
PublicAffairs, New York, 2017.
15 Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400–1000, Penguin, New
York, 2009, p. 29.
16 Stephen L. Dyson, Community and Society in Roman Italy, Johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore, 1992, p. 177, quoting J. E. Packer, “Middle and Lower Class Housing in Pompeii and
Herculaneum: A Preliminary Survey,” in Neue Forschung in Pompeji, pp. 133–42.

CHAPTER 11

1 David Satterthwaite, Gordon McGranahan, and Cecilia Tacoli, World Migration Report:

Urbanization, Rural-Urban Migration and Urban Poverty, International Organization for

Migration (IOM), 2014, p. 7.

2 UNFPA, State of World Population, United Nations Population Fund, 2007.

3 All data from Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Urbanization,” published online at

OurWorldInData.org, 2020. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization.

4 Vere Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, New American Library, New York, 1951, p. 181.

5 J.-P. Farruggia, “Une crise majeure de la civilisation du Néolithique Danubien des années 5100

avant notre ère,” Archeologické Rozhledy 54 (1), 2002, 44–98; J. Wahl and H. G. König,

“Anthropologisch-traumatologische Untersuchung der menschlichen Skelettreste aus dem

bandkeramischen Massengrab bei Talheim, Kreis Heilbronn,” Fundberichte aus Baden-

Württemberg 12, 1987, 65–186; R. Schulting, L. Fibiger, and M. Teschler-Nicola, “The Early

Neolithic site Asparn/Schletz (Lower Austria): Anthropological evidence of interpersonal

violence,” in Sticks, Stones, and Broken Bones, R. Schulting and L. Fibiger (eds), Oxford

University Press, 2012, pp. 101–20.

6 Quoted in L. Stavrianos, Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History, Routledge, London, 1997,

p. 79.

CHAPTER 12
1 B. X. Currás and I. Sastre, “Egalitarianism and Resistance: A theoretical proposal for Iron Age
Northwestern Iberian archaeology,” Anthropological Theory, 2019,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499618814685.
2 J. Gustavsson et al., Global Food Losses and Food Waste, Food and Agriculture Organisation
(FAO), Rome, 2011, http://www.fao.org/3/mb060e/mb060e02.pdf.
3 Alexander Apostolides et al., “English Agricultural Output and Labour Productivity, 1250–1850:
Some Preliminary Estimates” (PDF, November 26, 2008), retrieved May 1, 2019.
4 Richard J. Johnson et al., “Potential role of sugar (fructose) in the epidemic of hypertension,
obesity and the metabolic syndrome, diabetes, kidney disease, and cardiovascular disease,”
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 86, issue 4, October 2007, 899–906,
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17921363/.
5 I. Théry et al., “First Use of Coal,” Nature 373 (6514), 1995, 480–81,
https://doi.org/10.1038/373480a0; J. Dodson et al., “Use of coal in the Bronze Age in China,” The
Holocene 24 (5), 2014, 525–30, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683614523155.
6 Dodson et al., “Use of coal in the Bronze Age in China.”
7 P. H. Lindert and J. G. Williamson, “English Workers’ Living Standards During the Industrial
Revolution: A New Look,” Economic History Review, 36 (1), 1983, 1–25.
8 G. Clark, “The condition of the working class in England, 1209–2004,” Journal of Political
Economy, 113 (6), 2005, 1307–40.
9 C. M. Belfanti and F. Giusberti, “Clothing and social inequality in early modern Europe:
Introductory remarks,” Continuity and Change, 15 (3), 2000, 359–65,
doi:10.1017/S0268416051003674.
10 Emile Durkheim, Ethics and Sociology of Morals, Prometheus Press, Buffalo, NY, 1993 (1887), p.
87.
11 Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide: Etude de sociologie, Paris, 1897, pp. 280–1.

CHAPTER 13
1 Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management, Comprising Shop Management: The Principles
of Scientific Management [and] Testimony Before the Special House Committee, Harper &
Brothers, New York, 1947.
2 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001 (1961), p. 232.
3 Peter Drucker, Management: tasks, responsibilities, practices, Heinemann, London, 1973.
4 Samuel Gompers, “The miracles of efficiency,” American Federationist 18 (4), 1911, p. 277.
5 John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life, Part II, Chapter 10, 1887, Project Gutenberg eBook,
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7952.
6 Ibid., Part I, Chapter 2.
7 Fabrizio Zilibotti, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren 75 Years after: A Global
Perspective,” IEW—Working Papers 344, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics,
University of Zurich, 2007.
8 Federal Reserve Bulletin, September 2017, Vol. 103, no. 3, p. 12.
9 https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf.
10 Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1996.
11 John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,
1975.
12 Advertising Hall of Fame, “Benjamin Franklin: Founder, Publisher & Copyrighter, Magazine
General,” 2017, http://advertisinghall.org/members/member_bio.php?
memid=632&uflag=f&uyear=.
13 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Apple Books.
14 All data sourced from U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and
FRED Economic Data, St. Louis Fed.
15 L. Mishel and J. Schieder, “CEO pay remains high relative to that of typical workers and high-
wage earners,” Economic Policy Institute, Washington, 2017,
https://www.epi.org/files/pdf/130354.pdf.
16 All data from the World Inequality Database, https://wid.world and compiled on
https://aneconomicsense.org/2012/07/20/the-shift-from-equitable-to-inequitable-growth-after-
1980-helping-the-rich-has-not-helped-the-not-so-rich/.
17 McKinsey & Company, McKinsey Quarterly: The War for Talent, no. 4, 1998.
18 Jeffrey Pfeffer, “Fighting the war for talent is hazardous to your organization’s health,”
Organizational Dynamics 29 (4), 2001, 248–59.
19 Malcolm Gladwell, “The Myth of Talent,” New Yorker, July 22, 2002,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth.
20 O. P. Hauser and M. I. Norton, “(Mis)perceptions of inequality,” Current Opinion in Psychology
18, 2017, 21–5, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.07.024.
21 United States Census Bureau, “New Data Show Income Increased in 14 States and 10 of the
Largest Metros,” September 26, 2019, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/us-
median-household-income-up-in-2018-from-2017.html?
utm_campaign=20190926msacos1ccstors&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery.
22 S. Kiatpongsan and M. I. Norton, “How Much (More) Should CEOs Make? A Universal Desire
for More Equal Pay,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9 (6), 2014, 587–93,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614549773.
23 Emily Etkins, 2019, “What Americans Think Cause Wealth and Poverty,” Cato Institute, 2019,
https://www.cato.org/publications/survey-reports/what-americans-think-about-poverty-wealth-
work.

CHAPTER 14
1 “Death by Overwork on Rise among Japan’s Vulnerable Workers,” Japan Times (Reuters), April 3,
2016.
2 Behrooz Asgari, Peter Pickar, and Victoria Garay, “Karoshi and Karou-jisatsu in Japan: causes,
statistics and prevention mechanisms,” Asia Pacific Business & Economics Perspectives, Winter
2016, 4(2).
3 http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-12/11/content_27635578.htm.
4 All data from OECD.Stat, https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSet Code=AVE_HRS.
5 “White Paper on Measures to Prevent Karoshi, etc.,” Annual Report for 2016, Ministry of Health,
Labour and Welfare, https://fpcj.jp/wp/wp-
content/uploads/2017/11/8f513ff4e9662ac515de9e646f63d8b5.pdf.
6 China Labour Statistical Yearbook 2016, http://www.mohrss.gov.cn/2016/indexeh.htm.
7 http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causdis/stress.pdf.
8 C. S. Andreassen et al., “The prevalence of workaholism: A survey study in a nationally
representative sample of Norwegian employees,” PLOS One, 9 (8), 2014,
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102446.
9 Robin Dunbar, Gossip Grooming and the Evolution of Language, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1996.
10 http://www.vault.com/blog/workplace-issues/2015-office-romance-survey-results/.
11 Aronson’s story is recounted in W. Oates, Workaholics, Make Laziness Work for You, Doubleday,
New York, 1978.
12 Leigh Shaw-Taylor et al., “The Occupational Structure of England, c.1710–1871,” Occupations
Project Paper 22, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, 2010.
13 Colin Clark, The Conditions of Economic Progress, Macmillan, London, 1940, p. 7.
14 Ibid., p. 17.
15 https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/.
16 David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Penguin, Kindle Edition, 2018, p. 3.
17 https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/.
18 The Economist, November 19, 1955.
19 Trends in College Pricing, Trends in Higher Education Series, College Board, 2018, p. 27,
https://research.collegeboard.org/pdf/trends-college-pricing-2018-full-report.pdf.
20 California State University Statistical Abstract 2008–2009,
http://www.calstate.edu/AS/stat_abstract/stat0809/index.shtml, accessed April 22, 2019.
21 Times Higher Education, University Workplace Survey 2016,
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/university-workplace-survey-2016-results-and-
analysis.
22 Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, Gallup Press, New York, 2017, p. 20.

CHAPTER 15
1 Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to
Computerisation, Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, 2013.
2 McKinsey Global Institute, A Future that Works: Automation Employment and Productivity,
McKinsey and Co., 2017; PricewaterhouseCoopers, UK Economic Outlook, PWC, London, 2017,
pp. 30–47.
3 PricewaterhouseCoopers, UK Economic Outlook, p. 35.
4 “IBM’s AI loses to human debater but it’s got worlds to conquer,” CNET News, February 11, 2019,
https://www.cnet.com/news/ibms-ai-loses-to-human-debater-but-remains-persuasive-technology/.
5 “The Amazing Ways How Unilever Uses Artificial Intelligence to Recruit & Train Thousands of
Employees,” Forbes, December 14, 2018,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/12/14/the-amazing-ways-how-unilever-uses-
artificial-intelligence-to-recruit-train-thousands-of-employees/#1c8861bc6274.
6 Sungki Hong and Hannah G. Shell, “The Impact of Automation on Inequality,” Economic
Synopses, no. 29, 2018, https://doi.org/10.20955/es.2018.29.
7 World Inequality Lab, World Inequality Report 2018, 2018,
https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-full-report-english.pdf.
8 Ibid., p. 15.
9 D. Meadows, R. Randers, D. Meadows, and W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth, Universe Books,
New York, 1972, p. 193, http://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Limits-to-Growth-
digital-scan-version.pdf.
10 New York Times, April 2, 1972, Section BR, p. 1.
11 J. L. Simon and H. Kahn, The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000, Basil Blackwell,
New York, 1984, p. 38.
12 D. Meadows, R. Randers, and D. Meadows, The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update,
Earthscan, London, 2005.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Index
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take
you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the
corresponding reference on your e-reader.
aardvarks, 56, 136
abiogenesis, 34
Abrahamic religions, 233, 266
Académie des Sciences, 67
acetogens, 74
Acheulean hand-axes, 65, 67–71, 80
Adam and Eve, 19–21, 23
adenosine triphosphate (ATP), 35
advertising, 346–9
Africa, human expansion out of, 164–5
agriculture
and the calendar, 233–5, 246–7
catastrophes, 208–13
and climate change, 185–9, 194–7
human transition to, 177–80
inequality as consequence of, 303
and investment, 250–2
Natufians and, 181–2, 184–5, 188–91, 193–6
productivity gains, 203–5, 232, 309, 319, 377
proportion employed in, 307–8
spread of, 225–7
and urbanization, 283–5
Akkadian Empire, 274
Alexander the Great, 274
American Federation of Labor, 333
American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 329
animal domestication, 181, 204, 210–11, 239, 257–62
animal tracks, 90–2
animal welfare, 266–7
animals’ souls, 265–8
anomie, 324–7

anthrax, 211
Anthropocene era, 403
antitrust laws, 62
ants, 42, 55–8, 281
Aquinas, Thomas, 158, 240, 248
archery, 134
Archimedes, 25, 109, 330
Aristotle, 240, 267–9, 302, 337
Arkwright, Richard, 315
armies, standing, 288
Aronson, Ben, 375–6
artificial intelligence, 2, 38, 253, 255, 392–3, 395, 405, 407, 410
ass’s jawbone, 77
asset ownership, 394
AT&T, 351
Athens, ancient, 287, 297
aurochs, 191
Australian Aboriginals, 94, 126, 148, 154, 178
Australopithecus, 64–5, 70, 72, 85, 98, 103–4, 107, 110
automation, 1–3, 9, 272, 301, 359, 378, 388–97, 406–7, 410
Aztecs, 255
baboons, 209
Baka, 148
BaMbuti, 137, 146–8, 152, 226, 409
bank holidays, 335, 337
Bantu civilizations, 305
barter, 240, 242, 244–6, 251, 323
Batek, 148
Bates, Dorothea, 183
beer, 184, 190, 193–4, 296, 307
bees, 42, 218, 256, 281
Belgian Congo, 145–6, 366
Bergen Work Addiction Scale, 369
Biaka, 148
billiards, 24–6
biodiversity loss, 192, 403–4, 406
birds of paradise, 50
bison, European, 74
Black-Connery, 30-Hours Bill, 339
Blombos Cave, 131–3, 135
Blurton-Jones, Nicholas, 155
boa constrictors, 52
boats, burning of, 167
Bolling Allerød Interstadial, 187, 189, 194
Boltzmann, Ludwig, 29–31
boredom, 109–10, 114
Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, Jacques, 65–6, 337
bovine pleuropneumonia, 209
bowerbirds, 50, 381

brains, 80–3, 88–9, 99
increase in size, 103–8
and social networks, 372–3
Breuil, Abbé, 182
Broca’s area, 86
Bryant and May matchgirls’ strike, 338
bubonic plague, 224
“bullshit jobs”, 383–4
butchery, ancient, 74
Byron, Lord, 253
Calico Acts, 310
Cambrian explosion, 37
cannibalism, 288
caps, flat, 321
carbon dioxide, atmospheric, 188–9, 195
cartels, 62
Çatalhöyük, 204, 304
Cato institute, 359
cattle
domestication of, 262–4
as investment, 250–2
cave paintings, see rock and cave paintings
census data, 207
CEOs, 352, 354, 363, 367, 385, 396
cephalopods, 84
cereals, high-yielding, 216–17
Chauvet Cave painting, 169–70
cheetahs, 88, 93, 188
child labor, 316–17
childbirth, deaths in, 206
Childe, Vere Gordon, 175–9, 182, 226, 283–4
chimpanzees, 40, 72, 78, 82, 85, 103, 106
China, 282–4, 311, 352, 364–7, 387, 394
Han dynasty, 274
medical licensing examination, 392
Qin dynasty, 274
services sector, 377, 380
Shang dynasty, 255, 293
Song dynasty, 347
value of public wealth, 395–6
Chomsky, Noam, 113
circumcision, universal, 342
Ciudad Neza, 282
clam shells, 76
Clark, Colin, 378–80, 382
climate change, 185–9, 194–7, 403–6
see also greenhouse gas emissions
Clinton, Bill, 345
clothing, and status, 320–1

Club of Rome, 399–401, 404
coal, 311–12
Coast Salish, 141, 166
cognitive threshold, humans cross, 125–7, 169–70
“collective consciousness”, 371
“collective unconscious”, 21
colonialism, 309
commensalism, 61
Communism, collapse of, 351
Conrad, Joseph, 145–7
consultancy firms, 390–1
Cook, Captain James, 220
cooking, 106–7, 117–20, 238
coral reefs, 405
Coriolis, Gaspard-Gustave, 24–6
coronaviruses, 211
corporate social responsibility, 317
Cotrugli, Benedetto, 231
cotton, 217, 309–10, 366
credit and debt arrangements, 246–7
Crick, Francis, 32
crop rotation, 212
cyanobacteria, 36–7, 187
Cyrus the Great, 274
Darius the Great, 274
Darwin, Charles, 30–1, 42–3, 58–61, 67, 127, 158, 335, 337
debt, personal and household, 351
deer, 74, 94
demand-sharing, 152–7
Denisovans, 64
Descartes, René, 109, 264–5, 267–8, 270
DeVore, Irven, 139
Dharavi, 282
diamonds, 301–2, 349
diamphidia larvae, 89
Dinka, 288
division of labor, 241–2, 245, 323–4
DNA, 32, 128, 226
mitochondrial, 257–8
dogs, 109, 181, 240, 256, 262, 268
domestication of, 257–8
Lubbock’s pet poodle, 337
Pavlov’s, 88
wild, 57, 116
double-entry bookkeeping, 231
dreaming, 88
Dunbar, Robin, 113–14, 372
Durkheim, Emile, 322–7, 371, 374–5, 406
Dutch plow, 309

dwellings
drystone-walled, 190
mammoth-bone, 168–9
earth’s atmosphere, composition of, 188–9
earth’s axis, shifts in alignment of, 187
East India Company, 221, 309
“economic problem”, 4–8, 12, 143, 222, 228, 301, 345, 397–400, 407, 410
economics
“boom and bust”, 356
definitions of, 5, 345–6
formalists v. substantivists, 141–2
fundamental conflict within, 159–60
“trickle-down”, 351
ecosystem services, 405
Edward III, King, 320
efficiency movement, 334
egalitarianism, 151, 156, 161–4, 171, 198, 303–6
egrets, 218
Egypt, Roman, 207, 260
Egyptian Empire, 274
einkorn, 192
Einstein, Albert, 109
elands, 93–4, 101
elderly, care of, 116, 137, 140, 164
elephants, 63, 76, 101, 209, 250, 404
energy-capture, 213–16, 327, 405
Enlightenment, 58, 206, 243, 312
Enron, 356
Enterprise Hydraulic Works, 330–1, 334
entropy, 27–34, 87, 213, 285–6, 381, 411
EU Working Time Directive, 337
Euclid, 25
eukaryotes, 36–7
eusociality, 57–8, 115
evolution, 31–2, 34–8
and selfish traits, 158–9
see also natural selection
Facebook, 373, 398
Factory Acts, 317, 337
factory system, 315–17, 323
famines and food shortages, 208–9, 212–13
fertilizers, 215, 309
fighting, and social hierarchies, 112
financial crisis (2007–8), 352, 356–7
financial deregulation, 356
fire, human mastery of, 11, 96–103, 115–16, 178, 214
see also cooking
fisheries, 166–7
flightless birds, 52

foot-and-mouth disease, 209
Ford, Henry, 330, 332, 339, 344, 348
fossil fuels, 12, 187, 205, 214–15, 223, 248, 311–12
Fox, William, 311
foxes, 170, 197
bat-eared, 56
Franklin, Benjamin, 229–31, 243–4, 247, 249, 330–1, 337, 347
free markets, 59, 62, 223
free time (leisure time), 98, 107–9, 112–14, 121, 140, 143, 220, 319, 370
freeloaders, 155–6, 283, 381
Freud, Sigmund, 21
Frey, Carl, and Michael Osborne, 390
funerary inscriptions, 206
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 345–9, 397–8
Galileo, 25
Gallup State of the Global Workplace report, 387–8
Garrod, Dorothy, 182–4, 192
gazelle bones, 191, 194
genomic studies, 64, 83, 127–9, 135, 150, 164–5, 212, 226–7, 395
and domesticated dogs, 257–8
geometry, 267
gift giving, 157–8
Gilgamesh, 305–6
glacial periods, 186–7, 195–6
gladiators, 272
Gladwell, Malcolm, 355–6
globalization, 378
Göbekli Tepe, 197–205, 284
Gompers, Samuel, 333–4
Google, 351
Google AlphaGO, 392
Gordon, Wendy, 40
Gorilla Sign Language, 39
gorillas, 78, 85, 103–4, 106–7
see also Koko
Govett’s Leap, 175–6
Graeber, David, 244, 383–4
granaries, 196–7
graves, 170–1
graveyards, Natufian, 190–1
Great Decoupling, 350–1, 394–5
Great Depression, 339, 343, 368
“great oxidation event”, 36, 187
Great Zimbabwe, 287
greenhouse gas emissions, 215, 403
see also climate change
Greenlandic ice cores, 189
Grewia, 72
Grimes, William, 176

Gurirab, Thadeus, 279–80, 299–300
gut bacteria, 218
Hadzabe, 8, 149–52, 164, 206–7, 226, 372, 409
Harlan, Jack, 192
harpoon-heads, 134–5
Hasegawa, Toshikazu, 44
Health and Safety Executive, 367
health insurance, 351
Heidegger, Martin, 109
Hephaistos, 268
Hero of Alexandria, 312
Hesiod, 269
hippopotamuses, 209
Hitler, Adolf, 339
hominins, evidence for use of fire, 100–3
Homo antecessor, 64
Homo erectus, 64, 69–71, 76–8, 84, 95, 101, 104–5, 108–11, 116, 126
Homo habilis, 64, 70, 80, 98–9, 103–5, 109, 111, 116
Homo heidelbergensis, 64–5, 72, 77, 104, 111
Homo naledi, 116–17
horses, 264, 268
wild, 74–5
household wealth, median U.S., 341
housing, improved, 317–18
human resources, 333, 353–4, 374
Humphrey, Caroline, 244
Hunduism, 266
hunter-gatherers, “complex”, 165–6
hyenas, 74, 97, 136–7, 197, 201
immigration, 354
Industrial Revolution, 1, 3, 26, 28, 205–7, 213–14, 223–4, 227, 259, 282, 286, 289, 308–9, 311, 315–
17, 320, 325, 334, 370, 377, 389
inequality, 302–7, 349, 358–9, 393–6, 407
in ancient Rome, 272–3
influenza, 211
“informavores”, 87
injuries, work-related, 208
Institute of Bankers, 336, 338
Institute of Management, 334
intelligence, 84, 240
evolution of, 108–9
interest, 250
internal combustion engine, 178, 378
Inuit, 8, 119, 148, 265
Iroquois Confederacy, 244–5
Ituri Forest, 146
jackals, 88
Japan, 361–3, 365–7, 387

jealousy, see self-interest
jewelry, 132–3, 135, 157–8, 170–1, 190
Ju/’hoansi, 5–6, 49–50, 72, 90–3, 97, 103, 106, 108, 118, 132, 136–42, 149–52, 185, 193, 409
and animals’ souls, 265
contrasted with “complex hunter-gatherers”, 166–7
contrasted with farming communities, 234, 236–8, 250
creation mythologies, 17–23
and “creatures of the city”, 281
and demand-sharing, 155–7, 161
egalitarianism, 151, 156, 161–4, 171, 198, 303–4
energy-capture rates, 215
life expectancy, 206–7
and mockery, 162–3
village sizes, 372
Jung, Carl Gustav, 21
kacho-byo (“manager’s disease”), 363
kangaroos, 94
Karacadag, 192
karo jisatsu, 362, 366
karoshi, 362–4, 366
Kathu Pan hand-axes, 77–9, 110, 133
Kavango, 209
Kellogg, John Harvey, 342
Kellogg, Will, 342–4
Kennedy, John F., 345
Keynes, John Maynard, 3–4, 6, 26, 229, 301–2, 340–1, 345, 352, 389–90, 396–400, 403–4, 406,
410–11
Khoisan, 135, 150, 409
Kibera, 282
Kish, 307
Koko, 39–41, 85, 95
Kubaba, Queen, 307
Kwakwaka’wakw, 141, 166
labor/debt relationships, 239–40
labor theory of value, 248–50
Lake Eyasi, 149–51
Lake Hula, 102
Lake Turkana, 70, 102
language
arbitrary nature of, 118–19
evolution of, 111–14
Gossip and Grooming hypothesis, 113–14, 372
Grammaticalization theory, 113
processing, 85–6
Single Step theory, 113
langues de chat (cat’s tongues), 66–7
latifundia, 271
le Blanc, Abbé Jean, 321
leatherwork, 133

Lee, Richard Borshay, 136–8, 142, 151, 163, 215
leisure activities, 370–1
leisure time, see free time
Leopold II, King of the Belgians, 145, 366
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 21, 117–21, 139, 142
Liebenberg, Louis, 95
life expectancy, 206–7, 228
life on earth, evolution of, 34–8
lignin, 74
Limits to Growth, The, 400–3
lions, 23, 41, 59, 88, 93, 97, 115, 136, 188, 404
literacy, see writing
living standards, rising, 340–1
Loki, 23, 28
London neighborhoods, 289–90
longhouses, 245
Louis XIV, King of France, 320
Louis XVI, King of France, 24
Löwenmensch (Lion Man) sculpture, 170
Lubbock, Sir John, 335–8, 370
Luddites, 253–5, 315, 334
Luoyang (Chengzhou), 287, 380
luxury goods, 319–22
McKinsey and Co., 352–5, 391, 393
“malady of infinite aspirations”, 325–6
Malthus, Rev. Thomas Robert, 221–5, 401, 407
Malthusian Society, 399
Mapungubwe, 287
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 24
Marx, Karl, 249, 406
Master and Servants Act, 337
mathematics, 295
Mayans, 201, 255, 293
Meadows, Dennis, 399–402
measles, 211
Melanesian islands, 220
Memphis, 287, 380
mental health issues, 367–8
Mesopotamia, Islamic conquest of, 289
metalwork, 260
Midvale Steel Works, 331
Miller, George Armitage, 86–7
mockery, 162–3
Model T Ford, 332–3
mole rats, 57–8, 132
money, origins of, 240, 242–4, 246
monopolies, 161
“moral harassment”, 367
Mount Carmel Project, 183

Muaryan Empire, 274
Mughal India, 309
mutualism, 61, 218
Namibian independence, 20
nationalism, 326, 359, 411
Native Americans, 94, 141, 242, 244–5, 305
Natufians, 181–2, 184–5, 188–91, 193–6, 227, 260
natural selection, 43, 51, 53, 58–61, 115, 210
see also sexual selection
Navajo hunters, 94
navigation, 90
Nayaka, 148
Neanderthals, 64, 69, 76, 116, 126, 128–9, 165
Dorothy Garrod and, 182–3
needs, “absolute” and “relative”, 301–2, 341, 348, 403
nettle soup, 106
neuroplasticity, 80–1, 83–5, 88–9, 104, 256, 294
“New Class”, 397–8
newborns, human, 81–2
Newcomen, Thomas, 314
Newton, Sir Isaac, 25, 109, 241, 330
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 110
Noah’s Ark, 201
Nuer, 288
nutritional deficiencies, 207, 211
Oates, Pastor Wayne, 368
Occupy movement, 357
ocean acidification, 403
Oldowan tools, 70
Olmecs, 293
Olorgesailie flakes, 130
Orangi Town, 282
orangutans, 104
orcas, 63
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 365, 390, 393
overwork, 362–6
oxpeckers, 218
oxygen, atmospheric, 36–7
ozone layer, 38, 195
Pacific North West Coast peoples, 152, 166–8, 171
Paiute, 94
paleogenetics, see genomic studies
Palmyra, 204
pangolins, 56
Papua New Guinea, 284, 288
“paradox of value”, 301
parasite economy, 156
parasites, 210–11, 218

parasitism, 61
Parkinson’s Law, 384–5
Parthenon, 198
passerine birds, 53–4
pathogens, 209–11
Patterson, Orlando, 270
Patterson, Penny, 40
Pax Romana, 274
peacocks, 43–5
Pennsylvania Gazette, 230, 347
Persian Empire, 274
persistence hunting, 92–5
pestles and mortars, 190, 194
pests, 209–11
Peterson, Nicolas, 154
Pfeffer, Jeffrey, 355–6
photorespiration, 188–9
photosynthesis, 36, 188–9
“physiocrats”, 241
plant domestication, 180–1, 204–5, 210, 217–21, 284–5
Plato, 240
Polanyi, Karl, 141
Pompeii, 347
population growth, 221–5, 227–8, 287, 309, 399–400
post-capitalism, 410
post-industrialization, 378–80, 388
potlatch ceremonies, 167
probability, 29
prokaryotes, 36, 87
prostitutes, 272
public wealth, transfer to private hands, 395–6
purposive (purposeful) behavior, 40–2, 63
Putamoyo River, 366
Pyramids, 201, 296
pyrite, 100
Pythagoras, 25, 267
Qesem Cave, 102–3
Quarternary Ice Age, 186
Reagan, Ronald, 351
renewable energy, 215
Ricardo, David, 221, 249
Rigollot, Marcel Jérôme, 67
ritual burial, 116–17
robots, 1–2, 255–6, 390, 392–3
rock and cave paintings, 101, 111, 126, 169–70
Roman Empire, endurance of, 274–5
Rome, ancient, 207, 213, 255, 270–6, 297, 303, 320, 366, 380
collegia (artisan colleges), 273–4, 276, 292, 371–2
trades and professions, 290–2

and urbanization, 286, 290–2
and wealth inequalities, 272–3
Romulus and Remus, 287
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 339, 345
Rubik’s cube, 30
rubisco, 188
Russian Revolution, 407
Sado, Miwa, 361–2, 366
Sahlins, Marshall, 142–3
St. Paul’s Cathedral, 198
SARS, 211
Savery, Thomas, 312, 314
scarcity, problem of, see “economic problem”
Schmidt, Klaus, 197–8, 200
Schöningen spears, 74–6
Schrödinger, Erwin, 31–3, 87, 384
“scientific management”, 329, 332–4, 375
sculptures, 170, 190
second law of thermodynamics, 27–8, 32–3
seduction, 115
self-interest, 158–64
Semliki River, 134
services sector, 377–84, 389
sexual relationships, and work, 373–4
sexual selection, 43–4, 60
shamans, 97, 115, 323
Shelley, Mary, 253, 255
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 253
shellfish, 132, 166
Sherman Act, 161
Sibiloi National Park, 102
Sibudu Cave, 133
“skull cult”, 201
skull morphology, 112–13
slavery, 9, 255, 268, 270–6, 309–11, 366
slaves, ceremonial murder of, 167
Smith, Adam, 3, 160–1, 221, 240–5, 248–9, 323, 325, 334, 337
snapping shrimp, 57
social hierarchies, 112
social learning, 85
social networks, 372–3
social welfare, 59
South Korea, 364–5, 367, 387
space, domestication of, 238–9
Spencer, Herbert, 58–9, 61
spinning frame, 315
steam engines, 26, 253–4, 311–14
sticklebacks, 52
Stonehenge, 198, 232–3, 237, 284, 288

structuralism, 117–21
sugar, 310–11, 319, 366
suicide, 176, 324, 367
see also karo jisatsu
Sumerians, 255, 294, 296
sumptuary laws, 320–1
Sunghir, 170–1, 215
supply and demand, 248
survival of the fittest, 58–60
sustainability, 211, 223, 404, 409–10, 412
symbiosis, 61, 218
synaptic pruning, 82
Takahashi, Mariko, 44–5
“talent,” myth of, 352–7, 385, 391
Tarahumara hunters, 94
taxation, 155–6, 410
Taylor, Freerick Winslow, 329–35, 337, 339, 375
Taylorism, 332–4, 343
technological unemployment, 389–90
television, 349
Tenochitlán, 287
termites, 42, 54–8, 61–3, 76, 115, 218, 281
Thatcher, Margaret, 351
theft, tolerated, 155–6
theological conservatism, 411
Thieme, Hartmut, 76
Thirty Years’ War, 264
thumbs, opposable, 80
time, transformation in understanding of, 235
“time is money” (the phrase), 230–1, 247, 330
Tower of Babel, 201
toxoplasmosis, 211
trade unions, 273, 319, 333, 337–8, 345
Tsimshian, 166
Turnbull, Colin, 146–7
UK Office for National Statistics, 377
UN Climate Change Conference, 9
underwork, 375–6
universal basic income, 410
universe, creation of, 27
universities, 385–7
upright posture, and vocal capabilities, 113
urbanization, 11–12, 279–83
and agriculture, 283–5
emergence of new professions, 289–93
neighborhoods and trades, 289–90
Uruk, 246, 289, 294, 296–7, 305–7, 380
Urukagima, King, 305
U.S. Treasury, 231

vervet monkeys, 85
vestigial features, 52
vocal abilities, 113–13
vultures, 197, 201
wages
improved, 317–19
and productivity, 350–1
waterwheels, 260
Watson, James, 32
Watt, James, 314
weaver birds, 45–54, 62–3, 204, 286
weed species, 185, 210
whales, 52, 81, 131
wheat, wild, 191–2, 219, 260
wheels, pulleys and levers, 260
Wilde, Oscar, 3, 411
wildebeest, 41, 59, 93
Windhoek, 279–80, 299–300
windmills, 260
Wonderwerk Cave, 100–3, 215
Woodburn, James, 151–2
Wordnet database, 86
work
definition, 7–8
the word, 24–6
workaholism, 368–9, 371
working hours, 337–44, 351, 362–6, 370, 398
workplace engagement, 387–8
World Debating Championships, 392
World Economic Forum, 390
Wrangham, Richard, 103
writing, 293–6
Xerxes, 274
Yanomamo, 288
Yolngu, 154
Younger Dryas, 195–6, 205
Yukhagir, 265
Zen Buddhism, 110
Zeus, 69, 269
Zilliboti, Fabrizio, 341
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A Note on the Author

James Suzman is an anthropologist specializing in the Khoisan peoples of

southern Africa. A recipient of the Smuts Commonwealth Fellowship in

African Studies at Cambridge University, he is now the director of

Anthropos Ltd, a think tank that applies anthropological methods to solving

contemporary social and economic problems. He has written for

publications including the New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the

New Statesman, and the Independent. He lives in Cambridge.

A Note on the Text

The text of this book is set in Linotype Stempel Garamond, a version of

Garamond adapted and first used by the Stempel foundry in 1924. It is one

of several versions of Garamond based on the designs of Claude Garamond.

It is thought that Garamond based his font on Bembo, cut in 1495 by

Francesco Griffo in collaboration with the Italian printer Aldus Manutius.

Garamond types were first used in books printed in Paris around 1532.

Many of the present-day versions of this type are based on the Typi

Academiae of Jean Jannon cut in Sedan in 1615.

Claude Garamond was born in Paris in 1480. He learned how to cut type

from his father and by the age of fifteen he was able to fashion steel

punches the size of a pica with great precision. At the age of sixty he was

commissioned by King Francis I to design a Greek alphabet, and for this he

was given the honorable title of royal type founder. He died in 1561.

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